Design Vector Idea

A tutorial for,How you can create a rough wood texture using Zbrush, 3DS Max and Photoshop. This can be interesting if you want to make a totally handpainted texture as well. There are just a couple of layers you can make differently to create a more stylized handpainted texture.All that is included in the .PSD at the bottom of this page.

This is a very rough type of wood and I would usually not bother going into Zbrush to create a smoother type of wood surface.

As with all material types there are a lot of different types of wood, for instance you could have a painted wood with thick layers of paint where the normal and specular/glossiness is very important, or you can have a very smooth polished type of wood where you almost have a glass like surface. In this tutorial I did not even bother to create a separate glossiness map as it would have been very matte (dark) anyhow I though I would not gain too much on using that. I also used some color in my specular map, only some engines have support for this but it can definitely help making your material more interesting.

So I decided to create two different planks where I go through each side in Zbrush, I will then place them out in 3DS Max one by one and rotate them so I get a unique side for each plank.

Then I tesselated them a fair bit, around 70000 triangles for each plank. You can of course do this in Zbrush if you prefer.

I did tesselate them a bit more in Zbrush as I noticed they would need more detail, so here I am working with about 2 million triangles, which is really pretty overkill for the end resolution I am going to use.

There is a great feature in Zbrush that lets you hide selections you make. You can hide whole objects or even just parts you select. Press "shift+ctrl" and drag a selection over whichever part you want to hide, if you release shift you will hide everything BUT your selection. To unhide everything again just hold down "ctrl" and click outside the canvas.

If you have read any of my other Zbrush material tutorials you will be pretty familiar with the "Mallet Fast Brush" probably. I use this brush for almost everything since it is a really quick way to deforme some edges.

So here I start draging a few brush strokes on the edges. Imagine a very old wood beam here, perhaps something used on an old wooden ship or similar. Try to use a pretty high intensity and a low focal shift while sculpting this.

Next up is to get some actual wood grain cracks in here. I find the easiest way of doing this is to use the "Projection Master". I then use a "Free Hand Brush" and while using a low focal shift I mix using ZAdd and ZSub settings on my brush strokes.

I drag out long brush strokes over the whole plank pretty slowly while trying to go a bit up or down when close to the edges, if you are a bit careful here you will start getting some nice cracks out naturally when draging brush stroke on top on brush stroke and repeating that.

Once you feel happy with the previous step we will need some finer wood grain as well (this is of course if you are going for that style, some more soft handmade wood style would probably benefit from just moving on from the previous step and import that right into 3DS Max). I use the same technique here as above, just using smaller brushes with a lower intensity. Remember you can exit the Projection Master any time and add as many layers as you want with it (but be a bit careful, sometimes it can "damage" your previous details if you go on too strong in the Projection Master).

After the above steps I import the exported file from Zbrush into 3DS Max (you may want to optimize it before importing it to 3DS Max tho, a great tool I usually use for this is Meshlab, Then, I make duplicates of my two planks using "Instance" and rotate them so no two planks are the same. After that I rotate and offset each plank a bit to help add some more depth.

TEXTURE MAPSI start off with a very simple base where I just draw out the edges of the planks and vary up each plank a bit.

I also used xNormal's "Normals2Cavity" function on a copy of my baked out normal map, OR you can use the "Cavity from normal" action in my Photoshop actions pack (big thanks to Teddy Bergsman for creating that particular action), it will give you a very similar result. Just run the action on a copy of your baked out normal map. 

I did blur and edit my result a little bit by hand as well, just making certain areas a bit stronger and some more subtle. When done put your ambient occlusion map to multiply blending and the cavity map to overlay blending.

Here I made a mask out of my ambient occlusion map, however I inverted it so I basically masked out the egdes a bit. As you can see I used a photo overlay here but on the next step I show that you could just replace this step with a handpainted base.

Here is an alternative way, I simply picked a few different colors and painted some long brush strokes using a fairly sharp brush with a pretty low opacity. Of course you can take this really far if you want to add some knots and details like that in your diffuse.

When the other layers (except any photo layers) are applied the end result feel pretty stylized.

Moving over to the specular I did decide to use some color in this specular and I find some subtle blue green can work for a rough and weathered type of planks.

I am using very subtle colors here, and usually I find that if you do not have support for specular color in your engine, perhaps there is support for tinting the whole black and white specular, and you can get really far with that.

Where it really makes a difference is on materials such as bronze and gold tho, but for general metal it can be a very welcome addition as well.

The biggest downside is that you will need all your RGB channels for a color specular, while if you were going for black and white specular maps you can add a glossiness map in one of the channels and have the specular in one and then even have one channel free for other funky stuff you can think of.

So as an example you could have the specular intensity in the green channel, the glossiness in the red channel and a cube reflection map, emissive map, detail map or anything else you may need for this particular material in the blue channel.

At last we have the normal map left. I did generate some high frequency details using the nVidia Photoshop filter from the photo overlay I was using before. Again, if you are going for a more soft handpainted look you may want to skip this one all together.

The last thing I add to get some more interesting depth when the material is lit is to add a subtle roundness to the planks. You can vary this a lot, but I find having an outgoing bevel like this work for most type of planks, you just make it more or less subtle. I generated this using the nVidia filter again on a base that looks like the black and white part in the image below, where I just made a small selection of a black and white gradient and copied it up 8 times and use a pretty high filter type in the nVidia filter (something like 7x7 or 9x9).

Finally, the finished texture maps. As I mentioned earlier I did not make a per pixel glossiness map for this one, instead I used a low value for the overall glossiness. Some engines support this type of value based input for surface slots. Like in the Unreal Engine you can add a constant to any slot you want.

This is the result with the maps applied.

 Glu3D is a complete system that makes easy making liquids in Autodesk's 3dsMax, Maya and XSI. glu3D uses particles to simulate the liquid behavior, and a multi-resolution polygonal surface is also generated to display the liquid surface.

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UV-Packer automatically redistributes all UV charts in a UV map for optimal fit. Do you often find yourself spending a lot of time to rearrange charts generated by pelting or do you need to modify UV maps because the proportions of the UV space or the size of the required padding have changed?

UV-Packer 1.11 is compatible with:

* 3ds MAX 2012 32 bit
* 3ds MAX 2012 64 bit
* 3ds MAX 2011 32 bit
* 3ds MAX 2011 64 bit
* 3ds MAX 2010 32 bit
* 3ds MAX 2010 64 bit

Requirements

* Microsoft .NET 2.0 installed
* Microsoft DirectX 9.0c

Download:

http://www.filesonic.com/file/890915174/_U...&_64Bit.rar

http://www.fileserve.com/file/QXcsfdk/_UVPacker Ver 1.11 For 3DsMax2012 32Bit & 64Bit.rar

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Unwrella is an exact unwrapping plug-in for Autodesk 3Ds Max and Autodesk Maya. It is a single click solution which allows you to automatically unfold your 3D models with exact pixel to model surface aspect ratio, speeding up texture baking UV map production significantly.Automatic one-click solution,Just apply the Unwrella modifier.

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V-Ray is a rendering engine that is used as an extension of 3Ds Max 2012.It is a rendering engine that uses advanced techniques, for example global illumination algorithms such as path tracing, photon mapping, irradiance maps and directly computed global illumination. The use of these techniques often makes it preferable to conventional rendering which are provided as standard with 3d software, and generally renders using these technique can appear more photo-realistic, as actual lighting effects are more realistically emulated.

Build 2.00.03

Modified features:
(*) The V-Ray RT render server prints out some more information in GPU mode (useful for troubleshooting);
(*) Added access to the V-Ray material override exclude list from MaxScript;
(*) Support for the four FumeFX render elements;

Bug fixes:
(*) Noise with "Clamp output" option enabled;
(*) Hilights from the base reflection layer of VRayCarPaintMtl material were darker than they should be;
(*) Slow rendering with many overlapping VRayProxy primitives;
(*) Randomly missing gizmos when rendering VRayEnvironmentFog;
(*) VRayLights that exclude an object could still affect that object through GI;
(*) Rendering with GI may use more detailed texture mip-map levels than necessary;
(*) VRayHDRI may not respect the specified memory limit for tiled textures;
(*) V-Ray RT: Objects could disappear in animation;
(*) V-Ray RT: When used as production renderer, animation of deforming objects is ignored;

Download Links
File Sonic:

 Hairtrix consists of two formerly independent plug-ins, hairfx and Ornatrix that can now be used in concert to create amazing hair and fur effects. Both Ornatrix and hairfx are production-proven hair creation and simulation tools for 3ds Max and they provide users with a multitude of advanced tools for creating realistic hair and fur, and simulating its movement.

With hair creation and simulation, it has always been difficult to achieve good results in a reasonable time frame. Getting hair to look believable is a hard task on its own. Having that hair animate believably can be even harder. The basic idea behind Hairtrix has been to make a combined generalized framework of tools that allow creation, manipulation, and rendering of sub-pixel objects such as hair. This is no easy task because of the complexity level of structures that have to be dealt with. However, Hairtrix makes creating and animating realistic hair and fur quickly and efficiently a reality.

 This small but significant topic is so important that it deserves it’s own post. Importing and exporting in ZBrush from other programs has many problems that must be solved to make the importing and exporting seamless between both programs. ZBrush’s Import export tab in Preferences controls the parameters and functions ZBrush applies to importing and exporting. The settings are set up to account for almost every possible arrangement to make your workflow seamless.