3/4 Basic materials

For quicker results, we’re going to work with the mental ray renderer. This comes packaged with 3DS Max and is a powerful rendering tool (and as such a bit more difficult).

Go to the Rendering menu  and click the Render Setup entry. Scroll down the Common tab and set the mental ray renderer from the Assign Renderer tab.

To create a simple, 2-piece material, open the Material Editor {} by pressing {M}, select an empty slot and apply it {} to the object. Click the Standard button and assign a Multi Sub-Object material.

Select the first material from the list that just appeared.  This is the cover material (ID 1 remember?). Click the Checkbox next to the Diffuse color swatch and assign an Ambient/ Reflective Occlusion map from the mental ray tab.

The settings are actually simple, once you get familiar with them. Set the:

» Color to what you feel will look appropriate
» Samples to 32 (the quality of the material)
» Spread to 0.9 (occlusion softness)
» Max. Distance to 2.0cm

Press the Go to Parent {} button twice (will take you two levels above, to the original multi sub-object mat) and click the second material. This is the page material (ID 2).

Again, click the Checkbox next to the Diffuse color swatch and assign a Tiles map this time.

Set the Preset Type to running bond and un-roll the Advanced Controls tab. Set the:

Tiles Setup:
» Texture color to complete white
» Horiz. Count to 0.15 (horizontal lines)
» Vert. Count to 60
» Color Variance to 2.0 (since the color is complete white, this will ensure a varied line texture)
» Fade variance to 2.0
Grout Setup:
» Texture to complete white
» Horizontal gap to 0.4

Finally, to make the book look smoother (we’ve used very few polygons), click the Modify tab {} and assign a  Smooth modifier from the drop-down list. Make sure you click the Auto Smooth check-box

To create a simple stack, select the Book and drag it upwards while holding the Shift key. This will duplicate your book. Make sure you set it to Copy so you can apply different materials to all of them.

To keep things less uniform, you can use the Rotate {} and the Scale {} tool on the books you duplicate.

To make things look better, drag and drop your first Multi Sub-Object material to a new slot, rename it and change the cover color. Repeat this step to create a couple of different materials.

4/4 Lights

Important: to get the lighting to look right you should really read our Interior Lighting tutorial. The steps we’ll outline here are very basic and are just meant to get you started.

Go to the Create {} / Lights {} tab, switch to the Standard lights and place:

» A main mr Area Omni with an intensity of 1 (or 1.5) and shadows on
» A secondary mr Area Omni with Shadows off and an intensity of 0.5
» A backlight mr Area Omni with Shadows off and an intensity of 0.2-05 depending on your needs.

The End

After some tweaks and whatnot:

First of all, sorry for such a long tutorial but, trust us, you’re better off understanding what you do, compared to just mechanically copying settings from random tutorials.