3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [202]
Tutorial: Coloring Easter eggs
Everyone loves spring with its bright colors and newness of life. One of the highlights of the season is the tradition of coloring Easter eggs. In this tutorial, you use virtual eggs—no messy dyes and no egg salad sandwiches for the next two weeks.
To create your virtual Easter eggs and apply different colors to them, follow these steps:
1. Open the Easter eggs.max file from the Chap 15 directory on the CD.
This file contains several egg-shaped objects.
2. Open the Slate Material Editor by choosing Rendering⇒Material Editor ⇒Slate Material Editor (or press the M key).
3. Double-click the Standard material in the Material/Map Browser. Select the material node in the Node View, and click the Diffuse color swatch in the Parameter Editor panel. From the Color Selector that appears, drag the cursor around the color palette until you find the color you want and then click Close.
4. In any viewport, select an egg and then click the Assign Material to Selection button in the Material Editor, or you can simply drag from the material node's output socket to the viewport object.
5. Repeat Steps 4 and 5 for all the eggs.
Figure 15.5 shows the assortment of eggs that we just created.
FIGURE 15.5
These eggs have been assigned materials with different Diffuse colors.
Using the Material/Map Browser
Now that you know how to apply materials to objects, the easiest way to get materials is from the Material/Map Browser. Max ships with several libraries of materials that you can access. If you open the Material/Map Browser with the Tools⇒Material/Map Browser menu, the Material/Map Browser panel appears, as shown in Figure 15.6.
Note
The Material/Map Browser can be docked to the left edge of the Slate Material Editor or pulled away from the interface as a floating dialog box. Double-click the title bar to re-dock it back to the interface.
The Material/Map Browser is the place where all your materials are stored. They are stored in sets called libraries. These libraries are saved along with the scene file or they can be saved as a separate file if you want to load and access them within a different scene. Within the Material/Map Browser, each library is contained with a separate rollout. These rollouts, called groups, hold any loaded material libraries, the available default Material and Map types, Controllers, Scene Materials, and Sample Slots, which hold the temporary material slots used by the Compact Material Editor.
FIGURE 15.6
The Material/Map Browser lets you select new materials from a library of materials.
The text field directly above the material sample slot in the Material/Map Browser is a Search by Name field. By typing a name in this field, you can search and select materials.
Tip
When browsing materials in the Material/Map Browser, you can use the keyboard to move up and down the material list. The left and right keyboard keys are used to open and close rollouts and the Enter key adds the selected material to the View pane. •
Working with libraries
Any time you adjust a material or a map parameter, a new material is created and the material's sample slot is updated. Although newly created materials are saved along with the scene file, you can make them available for reuse by including them in a library.
As more and more libraries get added to the Material/Map Browser, it can be difficult to locate the specific library that you want to use. To help with this problem, you can right-click the library title and choose the Edit Color Group option. This opens a Color Selector where you can pick a color for the library rollout. There are also options for changing how the materials in the library are displayed. The options include Small, Medium and Large Icons, Icons and Text, or just Text.
The right-click pop-up menu also offers an option to create a new library. New Libraries can be saved and loaded