What is standard material in 3ds Max?
The Standard material type provides a fairly straightforward way to model surfaces. In the real world, the appearance of a surface depends on how it reflects light. In 3ds Max, a standard material simulates a surface's reflective properties. If you don't use maps, a standard material gives an object a single, uniform color. Show
Note: The material appears in the Material/Map Browser only if the active renderer supports it. Scooter rendered with the default standard material This topic introduces the controls for Standard material, exclusive of the use of maps. Tip: The Standard material supports hardware-based viewport display for improved feedback while editing its parameters. For more infomation, see Viewport Display of Materials. Standard Color ComponentsA surface of a "single" color usually reflects many colors. Standard materials typically use a four-color model to simulate this. (This can vary, depending on which shader you use.) The four colors are known as the material’s color components.
The three color components blend at the edges of their regions. Between ambient and diffuse, the blending is calculated by the shader. Between diffuse and specular, you set the amount of blending by using the Standard material's highlight controls. When we describe an object's color in conversation, usually we mean its diffuse color. The choice of an ambient color depends on the kind of lighting. For moderate indoor lighting, it can be a darker shade of the diffuse color, but for bright indoor lighting and for daylight, it should be the complement of the primary (key) light source. The specular color should be either the same color as the key light source, or a high-value, low-saturation version of the diffuse color. For more tips on choosing color components, see Choosing Colors for Realism. Warning: When you change the shading type of a material, you lose the settings (including map assignments) for any parameters that the new shader does not support. If you want to experiment with different shaders for a material with the same general parameters, make a copy of the material before you change its shading type. That way, you can still use the original material if the new shader doesn't give you the effect you want. Other Standard Material ComponentsA standard material's specular color appears in highlights. You can control the size and shape of the highlight. A polished surface has a small and strong highlight. A matte surface has a large, weak highlight, or no highlight at all. Standard materials also have controls for making the object appear transparent, and for making it self-illuminating so that it appears to glow. Along with the material's color components, components also refers to the parameters that control highlights, transparency, self-illumination, and so on. Skip to main content This browser is no longer supported. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
Tutorial: Set up physically based rendering materials in 3ds Max
In this articleOverviewIn this tutorial, you'll learn how to:
Note The procedure described in this tutorial works in 3ds Max 2019 and 3ds Max 2020. A change in how 3ds Max 2021 exports bump maps means that normal maps will not be found by the conversion service if that version is used. Creating physically based rendering (PBR) materials in 3ds Max is a straightforward task. It's similar in many ways to PBR setup in other content-creation apps like Maya. This tutorial is a guide to basic PBR shader setup and FBX export for Azure Remote Rendering projects. The sample scene in this tutorial contains a number of polygon box objects. They're assigned different materials, like wood, metal, painted metal, plastic, and rubber. Broadly speaking, each material contains all or most of the following textures:
Prepare the sceneIn 3ds Max, the process for setting up a PBR material is as follows. To start, we'll create a number of box objects, each of which represents a different type of material. Tip It's worth noting before you start to create assets for Remote Rendering that it uses meters for measurement. So it's a good idea to set your scene's system units to meters. It's also a good idea to set Units to meters in the FBX export settings when you export a scene. The following screenshot shows the steps to set the system units to meters in 3ds Max.
Assign materialsNow that we have some objects in our scene, in this case a number of cubes, we can begin the PBR setup:
As you can see, there are a wide range of maps and textures that you can add to the material. For this tutorial, we use only five texture slots in the material. Tip It's good practice to name your materials appropriately, as shown in the preceding screenshot. How you generate your textures can vary according to preference or usage. For example, you might want to use tiling textures that can be applied to any asset. Or you might need specific parts of a project or asset to have their own custom sets of textures. You might want to use generic tiling textures that you can get online. You can also create them yourself in apps like Photoshop, Quixel Suite, and Substance Suite. Before we start to assign textures, we'll need to consider the asset's texture coordinates (UVW). It's a best practice when you apply any textures to a model to ensure that the model is unwrapped. (Textures won't display properly without proper UV unwrapping.) It's especially important for our purposes because we want to use an Ambient Occlusion (AO) map on our model. Unlike Stingray Shader in Maya, Physical Material in 3ds Max doesn't have a dedicated AO texture slot. So we'll apply the AO map to another slot. To allow it to be used separately from the other textures (tiling textures, for example), we'll assign it a UVW map channel of its own. We'll start by assigning an unwrap UVW modifier to the model, as shown in the following screenshot.
The next step is to create a second UV map channel.
Now that we've created the new map channel, we can return to the Physical Material in the Material Editor and start to add our textures to it. First we'll add the AO map because there's another step to allow it to work correctly. After the AO map is plugged in to our material, we need to configure it to use map channel 2. As noted earlier, there's no dedicated slot for AO maps in the 3ds Max Physical Material. We'll instead apply the AO map to the Diffuse Roughness slot.
We'll now assign the normal map to the PBR material. This action differs somewhat from the process in Maya. The normal map isn't applied directly to the bump map slot. (There's no normal map slot in the 3ds Max Physical Material.) Instead, you add the normal map to a normal map modifier, which itself is plugged into the normal's slot.
With the normal map correctly assigned, we can assign the remaining textures to complete the Physical Material setup. This process is simple. There are no special settings to consider. The following screenshot shows the full set of textures assigned to the material: Now that the PBR materials are created and set up, it's worth thinking about instancing objects in the scene. Instance similar objects in the scene, like nuts, bolts, screws, and washers. Any objects that are the same can yield significant savings in terms of file size. Instances of a master object can have their own scale, rotation, and transforms, so you can place them as needed in your scene. In 3ds Max, the process of instancing is simple.
This action creates an instance of your object that you can move, rotate, or scale independently of its parent and of other instances of that parent. Important Any changes you make to an instance while you're in sub object mode are transmitted to all instances of the object. So if you're working with an instanced object's components, like vertices and polygon faces, be sure that you want any changes you make to affect all of the instances. Remember that any instanced object can be made into a unique object at any time. Tip When instancing in your scene, it's a good idea to create instances as you go along. Replacing copies with instanced objects later is difficult. One final thing to consider before we move on to the export process is how you might want to package your scene/asset for sharing. Ideally, if you pass the asset on to clients or team members, you'll want them to be able to open and view the asset as it should be seen with a minimum amount of fuss. So it's important to keep your asset's texture paths relative to the scene file. If the texture paths for your asset point to a local drive or absolute path/location, they won't load into the scene if opened on a different computer, even if the .max file is in the same folder as the textures. Making the texture paths relative in 3ds Max solves this problem and is fairly simple.
You might notice that not all of your textures are listed in the Asset Tracking window when you first open it. This is nothing to be concerned about. Running through the path-finding process once or twice usually finds all of a scene's textures. The path-finding process is as follows:
Notice that the Full Path column is now blank. This means that the scene is no longer looking for the relevant textures in a specific (absolute) location. It will always find them as long as the .max file or related FBX file is in the same folder as the textures. Note You might have to repeat this process a couple times to find and resolve all textures and paths. This is nothing to be concerned about. Just repeat the process until all relevant assets are accounted for. In some cases, some files won't be found. In that case, simply select all the assets in the list and then select Remove Missing Paths. (See the preceding image.) FBX exportNow that we've made the texture paths relative, we can move on to the FBX export. Again, the process is simple, and you can do it in a couple of ways. Tip Unless you want to export your entire scene, it's a good idea to select for export only the assets that you need. In resource-intensive scenes, export can take a long time. If you've used modifiers like Turbosmooth or Open SubDiv, it's a good idea to collapse them before export because they can cause problems during export. Be sure to save your scene before collapsing them.
Important If you've created instances in your scene, it's important to select Preserve Instances in the FBX export settings. Remember, there are a couple of ways to export the file. If the intention is to share the FBX along with its texture files in a folder/directory, the settings shown in the following screenshot should work well. If you prefer not to share large folders/directories of textures along with the FBX, you can choose to embed the textures in the FBX. If you embed the textures, the entire asset, including textures, is added to a single FBX. Doing so combines your export into a single asset, but the FBX file will be considerably larger as a result. Important If the resulting FBX file is bigger than 2.4 GB, the minimum version specified in the FBX export settings should be 2016 or later. (See the preceding screenshot.) Newer versions have 64 bit support, so they support bigger files.
ConclusionIn general, this type of material looks more realistic because it's based on the real-world physics of light. It creates an additional immersive effect so that the scene appears to exist in the real world. Next stepsYou now know how to set up materials with advanced lighting for objects in a scene. You also know how to export objects to FBX format, which is supported by Azure Remote Rendering. The next step is to convert the FBX file and visualize it in Azure Remote Rendering. FeedbackSubmit and view feedback for What is material editor in 3ds Max?Using the Slate Material Editor - 3ds Max Tutorial
- [Instructor] The Slate Material Editor is a node-based interface for designing and editing shading networks or material shader trees. Before you open up the Material Editor, you should know that by default, it depends on the active production renderer.
Why materials are black in 3ds Max?When opening a 3ds Max scene, some (or all) of the objects in the Viewport are shown black in "default shading" or "flat color" views. These objects may have previously had textures or materials applied to them.
Where is physical material in 3ds Max?Creating a 3DS Physical Material
In the Inspector for the Material, click the Shader drop-down then click HDRP > 3DSMaxPhysicalMaterial > PhysicalMaterial3DSMax.
Is 16GB RAM enough for 3ds Max?Memory (RAM)
While the exact amount of RAM you need is going to depend on your particular projects, for 3ds Max we generally recommend a minimum of 16GB. Very complex scenes may need up to 32GB of RAM, although it is rare for 3ds Max to require more than 32GB.
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