Need help clarifying how materials work...

a-k-m

Hello,

I have a question about materials in 3ds max and in the game engines.
I was using the blender game-engine for the last 6 month and since there was no need to export objects to other engines there were no issues with the materials neither.

Following the advice of many in this forum I recently changed to 3ds max and have been doing some tutorials.

Now the problem is, that most of the tutorial's focus is on the renderer or animation. With that the tutorials cover the whole 3ds max materials thing.

Since I want to specialise in environment and prop art, I don't want to waste too much time with materials and stuff, which will be for no use later.

So when I do a model in 3ds max and I want to export it eg. to the cryengine, which materials can I use that will be recognized by the engine later?

Or does the eg. the cryengine or the udk-engine have their own material and uv-editor?

I still don't understand this workflow.

Another question: Does an environment artist need to be able to do animations?

Hope someone can help me out!

Thanks in advance!

Andr

Vailias

Materials: game engines have their own internal material system. All that usually matters is what you name the material, occasionally a game engine will also be able to import your texture maps for you depending on the exported format.

They do. It have a uv editor. UV's are part of the mesh data. They need to be made before final export. (in the vast majority of cases)

Animation: you likely don't *need* to know it, but any skills you have in addition to the basics will make you more versatile and valuable.

Xendance

UDK doesn't really have an editor for UV's, you can automatically flatten them and view them, but that's it really.
Also latest versions of UDK apparently support some sort of material translation between Max and UDK with the FBX file format.