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FIGURE 30.11

Cars rendered with the mental ray Car Paint shader use multiple layers, just like real cars.

Combining bump and displacement maps

When mental ray is enabled, you can also take advantage of the Utility Bump and Displace Combiner materials. These materials let you combine up to three different bump or displacement maps into a single material. Each map has its own multiplier that is used to set its intensity.

Using the Subsurface Scattering materials

The four mental ray materials that begin with “SSS” are Subsurface Scattering materials used to shade human skin. Skin has an interesting property that allows it to become slightly translucent when it is placed in front of a strong light source. The ears in particular are a good example of this because they allow light to penetrate and highlight their features. Most organic objects including leaves, rubber, milk, and skin can benefit from these materials.

Cross-Reference

If you want more information on mental ray, check out Chapter 47, “Rendering with mental ray and iray.” •

Summary

This chapter covered an assortment of specialized materials that enable specific types of effects. These specialized materials include matte/shadow, Ink 'n' Paint, DirectX Shader, and the various mental ray materials including the Arch & Design, Car Paint, and Subsurface Scattering materials.

In this chapter, you've learned about the following:

• Using the matte/shadow material to hide objects

• Creating a cartoon rendering with the Ink 'n' Paint materials

• Viewing game assets with the DirectX Shader

• Using the Arch & Design and ProMaterials materials

• Applying a multilayer car paint material

• Using the Subsurface Scattering materials

In the next chapter, you discover how the viewport can be made into a Canvas for painting directly on scene objects. The ability to render surface maps also is presented.

Chapter 31: Working with Procedural Substance Textures

IN THIS CHAPTER

Applying Substance textures

Randomizing Substance textures

Substance materials are made possible using a Substance map type found in the Material Editor. Although using these Substance materials tends to produce materials that look the same as other material types, the procedural aspect of these materials makes them unique. Most materials with this level of detail require a bitmap texture, and the larger the bitmap, the better the detail. These bitmaps, even when saved using a compressed format, can easily run several megabytes in size. Procedural textures, however, are created using a code, and the result is file sizes that are usually measured in kilobytes instead of megabytes.

So the benefit to using procedural textures is that you can get the detail of an amazing material without the cost in file size. Another huge advantage is that you can easily make changes to the textures by inputting different values into the code. This gives you lots of variety without having to duplicate, reload, and save in memory several different bitmaps. For certain conditions, such as 3d for the Web or for games, these advantages are huge.

Selecting and Applying Substance Textures

The Substance textures feature isn't a whole new way of creating textures with its own interface and rendering engine. Substance textures work with the existing materials in the Material Editor, and unless you were looking for them, you might miss them. Substance textures are available in the Material/Map Browser under the Maps category and can be used with the normal set of default materials.

New Feature

Substance procedural textures are new to 3ds Max 2012. •

The Substance map node includes output nodes for Diffuse, Specular, Normal, Bump, Displacement, Height, and Glossiness attributes. The material tree, shown in Figure 31.1, uses a Substance map to control the Diffuse and Normal channels of a Standard material.

FIGURE 31.1

Substance materials are made possible using the Substance map node.

After it's correctly linked, the resulting material is applied to