Composite Textures

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at using composite textures to create things like decals, graffiti, t-shirt designs, tattoos, etc. Pretty much anything where a symbol or design needs to be textured on top of a pre existing texture.

Decals on car paint, paint on bricks, etc.

This tutorial is written for those of you who already have a basic understanding of how textures and the 3DS Max material editor works.

To begin, open 3DS Max and create yourself a brand new scene. In this scene create a box that will represent the surface for our textures. I have made my box with 75 Length, 75 Width, and 50 height.

It really does not matter what size you make this box, as it is only here to representwhat might later look like anything from a brick wall, to the hood of a car, or a pirate flag waving in the breeze.

In this tutorial we are going to be needing several things. We will make a shiny solid colored texture to represent the paint for our object. This is the texturethat will cover the entire box.

Then we will need 2 other images. 1 of these images will be the full color image that we will use as the decal or the overlying texture that will appear on top of our paint.

The 2nd will be an image with the exact silhouette of our decal image. We will beusing it just like an opacity map, in this instance we will call it the mask image.

When using a Mask image, 3DS looks at grayscale patters. Anything that is blackin a mask image, will be invisible in your final render, and anything that appears white in the mask image, will show up completely visible in the final render.

Let's begin by opening up our Material Editor (M) and selecting the first empty texture slot.

We know from our basic understanding of the material editor and textures that the Diffuse color is the main color of the texture. We can change the color by clicking on the light grey box next to the word Diffuse: and selecting a color from the color palette or we can add maps to the Diffuse color by either clicking the small empty box next to the color swatch, or scrolling down to the map area.

To begin we need to adjust our settings here in the parent menu of our texture map. If we are attempting to make some glossy paint then this is where we need to give it it's shininess. Adjust the settings in the Specular Highlights area to your liking. I want my paint job to be rather shiny as well as give off a good amount of reflective light, so I'm going to give it a higher Specular level of 150, and a medium glossy level 50 for now.

You should notice the change in your texture settings up in the display area with all of the spheres.

This will need to be adjusted to fit whatever you are trying to mimic. Masonry work like a brick wall won't have a heavy shine like this, but some glossy paint will.

When you are satisfied with the highlights of your paint job, then we will need to move on to our maps rollout.Scroll down until you see the Maps rollout menu and click the + sign to open it up. You should see this:

This is the section we will use to apply our materials. In the case of this tutorial, a composite material. Click on the "None" button next to the words Diffuse Color... and in the resulting list, select Composite and hit OK.

By adding a composite map to our diffuse color, it allows us to use a combination of layers just like you would see in Photoshop to build one on top of another.

Take a moment to check out the menu in the composite map. You will see a Total Layers: 1, and then next to it is an icon that looks like a little + sign on top of a white page. Default for a composite map is a single layer. This + sign button is where you can add more layers to your composite material.

Down in the Layer1 options you see two large boxes on either side of a drop down menu, both labeled "None" Hover your mouse over each of these boxes to see the tool tip. The None box on the right should pop up reading "Mask" and the None box on the Left will pop up reading "Texture". The two images I told you that we would need on page 1 of this tutorial.

In between the None buttons you will find the drop down menu, this is the layer type selection. If you have any experience with Photoshop at all, you will recognize many if not all of the names in this list. Each one has exactly the same functions as the corresponding layers would in Photoshop. Normal will be another regular layer on top, while something like Multiply, will allow the colors to bleed through from the bottom layer to the top. We will leave these set at Normal for now.

On our Layer 1, we are going to define the base texture of our Composite material. We have already given it a shiny value in the main options and we could have gone ahead and given it a color as well. For the purpose of this tutorial however lets click on our Layer 1 None box on the left, the one for "Texture"

The Material/Map Browser list will open up again. Here we can put anything for our base texture from a photograph by selecting bitmap, to one of the many 3DS max generated textures you see here in the list.

For now we'll keep it simple and choose "Checker" from the list, then hit OK.

It will take you into the Checker pattern settings.

In here you can adjust the colors of your Checkerboard pattern, as well as how many times you want it to be tiled etc.

The only setting I want to direct your attention to is the one in the upper section under Coordinates. It is marked Map Channel: 1

A map channel is a way of assigning a variable to our texture that we can refer back to at a later time. When working with composite maps, it is a very good idea to assign a different map channel for each one of your layers in the composite material.

As we are working on Layer 1, we will leave this at its default of 1 to match.

We are going to leave the rest of our checkerboard at its default settings, so go back up to the top and click on the go to parent button as marked in the below image.

You will find yourself back in the Composite Materials settings, with a small version of our selected checker pattern now replacing the word "None" in our left side box.

In order to add our decal image, we will need to create ourselves a second layer. So click the + sign button in the top right now.

A new layer labeled "Layer 2" appears on top of our Layer 1 with the checkerboard pattern.On this layer we will be adding the images for our decal. The left side for the texture will be this image:

In the right side for the mask we will be loading this image:

As you can see, these images are very similar. The first is the full color of whatever we want our decal to be. The second image is a grey scale silhouette of the same image. Both images are the same size, and the frogs are in the same positions.

In the mask image, anything showing with a white color, will reveal our full colored frog decal in the final texture. The surrounding black color will make the surrounding area in the full color frog, vanish so we can see our checkerboard behind it.

Textures and Masks can be made in any image editing software from Photoshop, to Illustrator, to Flash, to Gimp. Both of our images for this lesson are .jpg images.

You can find a .zip file containing both of the above images here: http://animation.diclementi.com/tutorials/decal.zip

So let's get back to it shall we.

Back in 3DS Max, on Layer 2 of our composite material. Click on the Left side box marked "None".

The Material/Map browser where we got our check pattern will open up again. This time, select "Bitmap" from the list.

When the open dialogue box appears navigate to where you saved the decal images from above. Load the first one named decal.jpg

It will load the image, and take you to the bitmap settings menu.

In this menu we are going to look at 2 sets of settings. The first, is the Map Channel. Remember how we made the first layer Map Channel:1? This time, since we are working layer 2 of our composite material, change the Map Channel: settings to 2.

Also, We are applying our frog image as a decal. 3DStudio checks the Tile boxes automatically for you, but in this case we don't want it to tile our frogs. We just want 1 frog that we can position anywhere we like. So uncheck the boxes in the Tile Column as shown above. Make sure neither of the 2 boxes is checked.

Then click your Go To Parent button again, to return to our composite material menu.

Back in the composite material settings, you will see that a small picture of our frog has replaced the word "None" in the texture box on Layer 2.

Next, click on the None button over on the right side in Layer 2. The Mask button.In the Material/Map Browser, again select Bitmap and navigate to where you saved the second image named decalmask.jpg and click open.

In the bitmap settings window, you will want to make exactly the same changes as you did in the first decal image. Change Map Channel: to 2, and uncheck the boxes under Tile:

When you are finished and the settings look like above, then click the Go to Parent button to return to your Composite Material menu.

A small image of the frog silhouette has replaced the word "None" in our mask button.

That's it, our texture is complete. Make sure you have the Show Standard Map in Viewport button turned on in your Composite menu, shown below.

Then you can assign your texture to the box we created in our scene at the beginning of the lesson, by either simply dragging the sphere with our texture on it from the material editor to the box and dropping it, or by clicking the assign Material to Selection button.

Your box should change from its default color, but something is still missing. Our Frog decal is nowhere to be seen!

This is because we did a lot of work in creating the texture, but we still have to worry about creating what are called UVW coordinates on our box. The UVW Map modifier is where we will start to do this.

Select your box, and go to the Modify tab. From the Modifier List drop down menu, go all the way towards the bottom of the list and select the one that says "UVW Map"

It will add an instance of the UVW Mapping modifier to the stack above your box in the Modifier Tab window.

<--- In this first UVW Map modifier, select Box. This will fit the checkerboard pattern to all sides of our box.

<--- Scroll down till you see the Channel: settings. Notice the Map Channel: 1 just like we saw when we were putting the material together? It should say

Map channel 1, this is talking to our Layer with the checkerboard pattern in it. Which is why we can see the checkerboard pattern in our viewport, but not the frog yet.

In order to both see and position our frog decal, we need to add a second UVW Map Modifier to the Modifier stack. This first one is talking to map channel one, we need another to talk to Map Channel: 2. Which is the number we used for our frog decal's layer.

Go back up to the Modifier List drop down, and add another "UVW Map" modifier from the list, the same way we did before.

<-- This time leave the Mapping: set to Planar, this setting projects the texture image only outwards in front of and in back of a planar gizmo. The Box

setting projects it to all sides of a box gizmo, etc. We will adjust the gizmo soon.

<--- Make sure this UVW Mapping modifier is set to Map Channel: 2. So we have some coordinates talking to our frog layer of the composite material.

Now if you look in your Perspective viewport, you should see the checker pattern on all sides of the box, and our frog appears larger than life on the top panel of our box only.

We can further adjust the size of our frog, as well as his position on the box by going up to our modifier stack, and clicking on the + sign icon next to the top instance of "UVW Mapping" in the modifier stack.

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It will open the sub selection and you will see the word "Gizmo" under the top instance of UVW Mapping. Select the word in the stack as shown above.

Now you can use your Move, Rotate, and Scale tools to move just the gizmo around in your viewport.

Adjust the gizmo as necessary, and position your frog wherever you want him on your object.

You should be able to see the yellow outline of the planar gizmo around your frog, scaling him down, and rotating him to the other side of the box, then using the move tool to position him in the top right corner.

When finished, remember to unselect the sub selection word "Gizmo" in your modifier stack, and you will again be free to move your fully textured object around in your scene. The frog will now stay in place.

Use this method for any model, any shape. Just reposition your UVW Map coordinates and add decals, graffiti, dirt, blood smears, t-shirt graphics, etc. to any of your models.