Supporting materials for the Austin 3D Users' Group meeting at The Austin Game Conference on Oct 28 2005:

Thanks to Johnathon Vought for a demonstration on the new pelt mapping tool, render to texture, and normal mapping.

This page is designed to help you try out these techniques at your own pace.  See the link at the bottom of the page to download images for this tutorial

Notes:

Max8 Pelt, Rendering to Texture, and Normals

for “Meat and Potatoes” statics

Johnathon Vought

First thing…Fully-mapped texturing is a non-linear process

·         3dsmax procedurals, vertex, and lighting

·         Photoshop paintings, photo adjustments.  (You go back and forth with Photoshop and max)

New Max8 pelt

·         Selecting faces or making seam cuts. Point to point is great!

·         It’s not a bad plan to pelt something you already have uvs going for.

·         Doing the pelt simulation, rotating pelt points, relaxing the uvs.

Using multiple UV channels and “Channel Mapping”

                        The “mix” map with vertex colors for the mask.  Channel 1(and UV1) is the original unwrap or simple UVW map.  Channel 2 is the B mix where you plan to blend across the seams.  This map is UVWchannel2 and so is the corresponding texture.  The vertex colors that are black erase texture 2 from 1 and white fills in (like an alpha channel).  You must turn on vertex colors in the object properties to see this in action. 

When doing Multiple Channels, it’s wise not to do only a few texture blends at once.  

I use an iterative process, rendering to textures as I add layers.  If you’re happy with an unwrap, it’s a good idea to save it out in case you need to get back to it later.  You can easily get confused with which channels are doing what and at what stage of development, so I recommend uvw saves in a naming system that makes sense. Then reload them into the unwrap as needed or swap out channel 1 with 2.  Many game engines only support 1 uv channel so when you’re all done you gotta keep that in mind and put everything in 1.

Rendering to Texture(R2T)

                        It’s important to never use automatic unwrapping, never allow the computer to think about your UVs for you.  After all, that’s what we went through the trouble doing pelt maps and things.  It might also destroy uvs we needed for specific things like masks.  I usually prefer to embed any renders into material slots I’m not using (like specular color) rather than make a shell.  For me, it makes a faster workflow and I don’t lose original setups if the render goes bad.  Never overwrite your textures!  I use numbered naming saves in the file output in the render to texture outputs. 

Things to consider

·         Customizing the options in Unwrap

·         Consolidation of multiple textures into 1 map using R2T

·         Normal Maps can be generated using projection or transferred in consolidation processes                   

Click here for a directory of images you can download for this lesson