Materials and Lights

Tutorials

During a few tutorials we learned about the use of lights and materials in 3Ds Max. As there are many types of both of these, learning about them was important and interesting as it would help make our models look more realistic and accurate.

Materials

While creating my models for the assignment, it takes more than a few shapes to make a convincing Space Ship, Slug and Asteroid. By using the material editor it, my models will be given a skin that could represent any type of texture, including metal, fur, rock, wood etc. This could be very useful when it comes to creating the Millennium Falcon and Asteroid in particular. I can either create the material myself or find images on the internet, depending on how the final image looks.

In this example, I created a few random colour materials using Photoshop, and placed them onto some random objects. I felt this was a great practice and I now feel even more confident about creating realistic and acceptable models.

On this next example I used a material already found on 3Ds Max called Spiral on a sphere. I have included this in as I felt it has made a very nice looking gas planet, reminding me very much of our own Venus. If I was ever to try this in the future I feel this technique would be very useful. 

 

Lights

To create real life shadows over my models using Lights is a great way of doing this. Using Spotlights on these shapes creates more interesting and life like realism on everyday animations. I did find it quite tricky to get the hang of using Lights, but you can definitely tell the difference it creates. There are two types of Lights, one of them is Standard and the other is called Photometric. The difference between the two can be seen in the examples below:

 
Standard

Photometric

Photometric is clearly the more realistic one of the two lights; however this does not come without consequences. Due to the high definition and quality the rendering of the animation can take some time to be completed. As you can tell in the images, the shadow is a lot softer than and not as aggressive as the Standard light.