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Adjusting brightness

Digital images that are taken with a digital camera are typically pre-lit, meaning that they already have a light source lighting them. When these pre-lit images are added to a Max scene that includes lights, the image gets a double dose of light that typically washes out the images.

You can remedy this problem by adjusting the brightness of the image prior to loading it into Max. For images taken in normal indoor light, you'll want to decrease the brightness value by 10 to 20 percent. For outdoor scenes in full sunlight, you may want to decrease the brightness even more.

You can find the Brightness/Contrast control in Photoshop in the Image⇒Adjustments⇒Brightness/Contrast menu.

Scanning images

In addition to taking digital images with a digital camera, you can scan images from other sources. For example, the maple leaf modeled using patches in Chapter 13, “Modeling with Polygons,” was scanned from a real leaf found in my yard.

When scanning images, use the scanner's descreen option to remove any dithering from the printed image. If you place the image on a piece of matte black construction paper, then the internal glare from the scanning bulb gets a more uniform light distribution.

Caution

Most magazine and book images are copyrighted and cannot be scanned and used without permission. •

Tutorial: Creating a fishing net

Some modeling tasks can be solved more easily with a material than with geometry changes. A fishing net is a good example. Using geometry to create the holes in the net would be tricky, but a simple Opacity map makes this complex modeling task easy.

To create a fishing net, follow these steps:

1. Before working in Max, create the needed texture in Photoshop. In Photoshop, select File⇒New, enter the dimensions of 512 pixels × 512 pixels in the New dialog box, and click OK to create a new image file.

2. Select the Filter⇒Texture⇒Mosaic Tiles menu command to apply the Mosaic Tiles filter. Set the Tile Size to 30 and the Grout Width to 3, and click OK. Then select the Filter⇒Sketch⇒Stamp menu command to apply the Stamp filter with a Light/Dark Balance value of 49 and a Smooth value of 50.

3. Choose File⇒Save As, and save the file as Netting.tif.

A copy of this file is available in the Chap 17 directory on the CD.

4. Open the Fish net.max file from the Chap 17 directory on the CD.

This file includes a fishing net model created by stretching half a sphere with the Shell modifier applied.

5. Select the Rendering⇒Material Editor⇒Slate Material Editor menu command (or press the M key) to open the Material Editor. Double-click the Standard option in the Material/Map Browser to create a material node. Name the material net.

6. Locate and double-click the Bitmap option in the Material/Map Browser to add a node to the Node View. In the File dialog box that opens, locate and select the netting.tif image file. Drag a connection wire from the output socket of the Bitmap node and drop it on the input node of the Opacity parameter of the material node. Then drag the output socket for the material node and drop it on the net object in the viewports.

7. If you were to render the viewport, the net would look rather funny because the black lines are transparent instead of the white spaces. To fix this, select the Bitmap node, open the Output rollout, and enable the Invert option. This inverts the texture image.

Note

Although you can enable the Show Map in Viewport button in the Material Editor, the transparency is not displayed until you render the scene. •

Figure 17.39 shows the rendered net.

FIGURE 17.39

A fishing net, completed easily with the net texture applied as an Opacity map

Summary

We've covered lots of ground in this chapter because Max has lots of different maps. Learning to use these maps will make a big difference in the realism of your materials.

In this chapter, you learned about the following:

• Connecting map nodes