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Hello everyone, in this tutorial we will see an example of using the Blend Material type in 3D Studio MAX,
in particular to make the texture of a marble chessboard, creating the pattern of black and white squares of a chessboard,
using procedural textures, that is: without using images.
First of all: I'm Italian, so I'm sorry for my bad English, but you can turn on subs, I hope it will help!
Plus, in the description panel of this video there's a link to the text-version on cg-village.com!
Ok, let's start with this tutorial!
The basic Material type in 3D Studio MAX is the Standard one, which provides various channels for diffuse colors and textures,
specular color and intensity, reflection, refraction, and so on; however, there are other types that allow you to mix more Materials.
The Blend Material type considers two Materials and a mixing (or blending) value that can be a number between 0 and 100,
applied uniformly over the entire surface that possesses the Blend Material, or an image, called “Mask”,
a grayscale map that defines where and with which mixing factor use the first Material rather than the second one.
First of all, let's create a new Blend Material in the Material Editor.
As you can see in the editor, the Blend Material automatically creates two standard materials, connected to the two input ports
of the Blend material node; on the other hand, there is no input mask, so the mixing factor is the same all over the surface and based
- as we will do in this tutorial – on the numeric value set in Mix Amount, located in the "Additional Parameters" section of Node.
The value of 0.0 indicates that you will use only the first Material, 100.0 indicates that you will use only the second Material,
and to intermediate values correspond, intuitively, various degrees of mixing.
Select the first Standard Material and set a 3D Studio native Checker Map as Diffuse map (the base color Texture);
Checker is a black and white, 4 squares board.
Let's click on the M in the Diffuse channel to open the settings of that Texture and set 4 in Tiling X and Y,
so as to repeat 4 times the 2x2 squares along X and Y, obtaining a chessboard with 8x8 boxes,
regardless of the size of the mesh on which we will apply the texture.
Now, let's select the second Standard Material and set a Marble Texture as Diffuse map, changing the settings this way:
first color black, second color white and size 20.
Let's select the Blend Material Node and set a low mixing factor, such as 15 or 20, thus using more the first Material (Checker)
rather than the Marble "pattern".
In the 3D View, let's create an object, such as a Plane or Cube scaled on the vertical axis, then assign the Blend Material
to the object and take a look at the result: we have a 8x8 board with a "pattern" that is maintained through the various squares,
a result obtained using only two procedural, 3D Studio native Materials with Textures, no image files.
I dind't spend much time defining the Materials and I used a procedural texture for the marble pattern,
but of course you can define other channels of the Materials to add some effects, like reflection, refraction, and so on,
or choose images instead procedural Textures... these are only examples.
The real problem, now, is in the mapping: Checker covers the entire object, then it will be replicated on the sides and,
however, covers the entire upper surface... but this is another story and maybe we will talk about that in another tutorial,
since the argument of this tutorial is, in fact, the Blend Material type: the chess board is only one of many possible examples of use.
That's all, I hope you liked it! Bye bye!