{3D max} lighting, materials hard to understand
Hey guys how are you?
When i finally understood the modeling and uvs techniques in Max, i come up with the materials and lighting very very complicated. I have no idea what to do, and makes me really frustrated about it. They are so much option in material editor, and i have no idea what to use, or what some options are for.
Do you guys have any proper tutorials for this, that get me started and guide me until i got some understanding?
When i finally understood the modeling and uvs techniques in Max, i come up with the materials and lighting very very complicated. I have no idea what to do, and makes me really frustrated about it. They are so much option in material editor, and i have no idea what to use, or what some options are for.
Do you guys have any proper tutorials for this, that get me started and guide me until i got some understanding?
Replies
http://www.3pointstudios.com/3pointshader_about.shtml
http://xoliulshader.com/
The reason why the vray and mental ray shaders are so complex, is because real world materials are complex.
A material in the real world is actually just the result of light hitting a surface, getting information transfered into the photon and then shoots into your eye.
Lighting and materials are some of the hardest part of pre-rendered 3d(and most likely also realtime 3d), so it will take you alot of time before you grasp all the concepts and fully understand what each individual setting does and what effect it will have on the final image.
My recommendation is to start of simulating very basic light settings and materials and then take it from there. Just making a normal wooden floor is actually quite hard.
Look at sites like cg.tutsplus.com or cgcookie, they have some good start tutorials.
Look at how they're set up and why they work the way they work.
And read the help file as suggested!
For video games most shaders have the same basic texture inputs,
Diffuse (the basic texture)
Normal (adds extra lighting info for the surface normals, adds more detail without using polygons, most for current gen games)
Specularity (or how shiny parts of a model are, most games have this as a texture but can be a value to save memory)
Specular power (or gloss map or how tight the shinny is, can be a value or texture)
Emissive (or glow)
Opacity (which parts are see through)
There's a lot more from there, in video games the less shader processes the better, so you normally stick with the basics, Diffuse, spec, normal, sometimes a scaled down low rez gloss map. In the unreal engine there's a lot of ways you can animate the textures or play with how it tiles or how the vertex colors affect the look. But you can get awesome models with just those.
More info about each on here or googling, a lot of info is on the real wikipedia as well. http://wiki.polycount.com/Polycount
There's probably no reason you need to learn vray or mental ray. Most game artists have some working knowledge of it. It is sometimes nice to fool around with it. But being able to work with a realtime shader is a more important skill to know. Most game companies wont look at your portfolio very long if it says rendered in vray or mental ray. View port shaders aren't exactly what are used in games but close enough, if you want to work with a real game engine UDK or Unity 3D are free and easy to work with.
Lighting for games is a lot more basic, there's different solutions for different engines. But for viewport shaders, normally you put 3 point lights placed around so not much is completely black. Then make 1 strong, one mild, and one weak light and play with the color of the lights, but not too much. Think of the scene, the model outside or sided, day or night. During the day the sun is sometimes very warm and orange in color, while the blue sky also reflects a lot of blue light at us as well. But inside sunlight is very cold compared to the orange glow of light bulbs.
If you have anymore questions just reply or try some google searches.