Creating bitmap output files - Using Bitmap2Material inside 3ds Max
[Instructor] In this last exercise for the chapter, we're going to quickly demonstrate how we could, if we either needed or wanted, swap out the procedural inputs being fed into our physical material and instead make use of regular bitmaps in the material tree. All, of course, without altering the look of the final rendered piece in any noticeable way. Indeed, there are in fact two ways in which we could go about doing this now. One would be to use what, in my experience, appears to be a seldom used piece of 3ds Max functionality, namely the render map option, that can be found by right-clicking on a map node in the material editor or we could come to the output settings rollout on our substance node and use the make outputs button.
This, when clicked, let's us select a folder to which our files will be written after which we get to choose the output format, or rather we can choose between the JPG, PNG, and bitmap formats. The problem I currently have with this particular approach, though, is that it very literally writes out a file for all of the outputs listed in the output's rollout on the substance, whether they are active or not, which for me is not a particularly efficient way of doing things in terms of managing file storage.
In this instance then, I am going to cancel and go back to my tried and trusted render map approach. One thing I will do whilst in this rollout, though, is increase the quality of our current bitmap to material output by setting the substance to output at 2K, which when rendered looks even better. To take care of exporting our bitmaps then, let's right-click on the final node in the chain for the base column map, before the material that is, which in this instance is the map output selector.
Then, amongst the many options and commands available, find the render map option which, if I select, brings up the render map dialogue. Now, by default this is set to render out just a single, 240 by 240 frame, although if we are working with animated materials or substances, we can certainly accommodate image sequences as well. See, cause we are rendering with our substance node set at a resolution of 248 by 248 though, I'm going to go ahead and punch in that same value here as well.
We will naturally need to pick a destination on disk to which our files can be saved, and so what we would want to do is hit the files button and navigate through to our exercise files and render output folders. Now, in testing this course on various machines, I have run into an unfortunate and again random bug that results in an output path doesn't exist warning after which the render bots. A quick workaround for this would be to use a UNC path so as to bypass any Windows drive letter assignments that may be causing the problem.
The simplest way of doing that being to navigate to the exercise files folder by means of the network browser. The resulting path in my case being computer name, users, user name, desktop, exercise files, written output, computer name, and username, of course, being IDs that are specific to your own computer setting. Which ever way you get there though, let's end the exercise files render output folders, create a new folder called map outputs, and then after jumping into that, we can save that using the JPG format, calling this particular map, base color.
When we hit the save button, if there are any options available for the file type that we have chosen, we get a configuration dialogue popup which we can tweak if we want, after which we can click okay and then hit the render button. Because this function uses 3ds Max's scanline engine, the render process goes by very quickly indeed, even when saving out high resolution images. Once done, of course, we will need to walk through the same process for each of the output maps that we are using, whilst naming them appropriately and then load them back into the material editor using the bitmap node.
Although in this instance, we can happily ignore the metallic and opacity maps as they aren't contributing to this particular material in any way. Once that is done, we can make certain that the bitmaps are plugged into the relevant channels on our material and then go ahead and take a final render. What we get now is an almost identical result to the procedural substance system that we were just using. Because we have been running into a few issues with our bitmap to material node disconnecting itself, I'm going to leave these bitmaps in place here and move onto our next chapter where we can start to work with the substance designer application and add some flooring into our scene.