Tweaking the material - Using Bitmap2Material inside 3ds Max
[Instructor] Whilst we have successfully added an image to our Bitmap2Material substance node for use as an input, and gotten it to render without a problem, I think we would have to admit that things are still looking pretty rough material-wise at this moment in time. What we want to do next then is use at least some of the huge number of controls made available to us on the Bitmap2Material node in order to see if we can make our curtain material look a little bit better than it currently does. In the Curtains tab of the Slate Material Editor then, let's again Double Click the substance to bring up its parameters, hit the Reload button found in the Substance Package Browser rollout, and then reconnect the bitmap to the inputs that now reappear.
Coming back to our material, the things that we noted as we finished the previous exercise were that one, lighting or luminance changes could be clearly seen in the render, and that two, seams were also very visible. Now, as we look down the long list of options available to us in the Bitmap2Material node, we may feel a little bit overwhelmed as to where to start. In this instance though, we can make a pretty big difference to what we are seeing by using just a handful of these controls.
In fact, one of the biggest changes we'll be seeing, if we just jump into the Global rollout and then in the Make It Tile dropdown, choose the Edges Quincunx option. Straight away if we take a render now, we can see that things are looking much better already. Still a way to go, though. And so, let's jump into the Base Color rollout next and set the Light Equalizer Positive sliders to one, the Negatives to zero, the AO Cancellation and Radius controls to zero as well, and then also set the Diffuse Details value to 0.2.
If we save what we have to the V-Ray Frame Buffer's history list now and render or region render again, we can compare and see that we have made yet another jump forward in terms of getting something usable out of this quick photo snap. To take a look at how aspects of the material other than the base color are working, let's save our current render to history, unhook the base color map, and take another render.
Which reveals that things are looking a little bit flat, at least to my way of thinking. Now, before we go ahead and tweak that up in our substance, we do need to make a change to the way in which the Substance to Physical Material option that we used earlier has set things up. Mainly because the script that particular command runs has no way of knowing that we are actually using V-Ray as our renderer. And so, has set things up in the bump or normal channel for Max's scanline engine. To fix that, all we need do is delete out the Normal Bump node that was autogenerated and instead add and connect up a VRayNormalMap.
Meaning, we are now ready to improve the relief effect on the substance node itself by jumping into the Relief rollout and setting the Normal Intensity value to 32. Finally, let's go to the Roughness/Glossiness rollout and set the Roughness value to 0.4. And then in the Coordinates rollout, set Tiling to two.
If we then save what we have and render, you can see that we now have a little more punch in the pattern. Remembering, of course, that this tiling change will affect the base color map once we add it back in as well. Now, if you are wondering why I have been using the sliders and spinners here rather than just typing values into the numeric fields, this is because at this moment in time numeric input into some of these fields, at least on my machine, is somewhat broken.
A problem that will hopefully get fixed in the not too distant future. Let's also add the base color map back into our material now and then take a final render to see what we have created. Which, whilst not brilliant, would certainly be very usable in some situations. Again, bearing in mind that the input image we have used, other than being cropped to a square, has had no prep work done to it at all. And of course, the brilliant thing here, if I just drop another bitmap node onto the work area, and navigate to that same curtain resources folder in the Exercise Files download, is that I can quickly try out any number of images that I may have available in order to see what kind of result each of them gives.
Now, typically we would want to tweak the Bitmap2Material settings a little for each unique image that we try out, but if I just go ahead and render again, you can see that we straight away get something different and yet fairly decent straight out of the box. All whilst using yet another almost completely unprepped snapshot image.