Material Tips and Tricks Part 2

by Montree T. (easyyong@hotmail.com) - Smoke3dStudio  


2. Self illumination map


Just imagine how the lampshade's illumination looks like first. A self illumination map can be easily done with many layers of gradient ramp.


1. Black and white cross hatch bitmap put on mix map and change the color for the lampshade's diffuse color.



2. Gradient ramp map tree for self illumination maps.




2.2. Fluorescent diffuser (light box)

We can create this map by using two layers of gradient ramp and putting in self-illumination maps.



2.3 Fake translucency using falloff map on self illumination map

From Max help file: "Translucent shading is similar to Blinn shading, but it also lets you specify translucency. A translucent object allows light to pass through, and also scatters light within the object. You can use translucency to simulate frosted and etched glass."


            Translucent shader


There is an unwanted shadow appearing on the sphere which is the translucent shader or translucent color in the raytrace material. I have not yet found a solution to solve this problem.



Fake Translucent, using falloff map (shadow and light) on self-illumination map in Blinn shader.



Though the effect of this falloff map is not as good as the real translucent shader, the effect is still too closed and without the weird shadow appearing on the object.

An example of faking translucent, using falloff.
 
1. Diffuse
   *2. Self illumination

 
3. Opacity
   4. Reflection

   
5. Refraction
    



The beer bottles in the image are just small items compared with the whole scene, so it's non-sense if we put the material above for these as the rendering time are surely super long. So, for these bottles, it's enough to put only the self illumination and opacity map on them.

2.4 Vertex illumination

Vertex color illumination color overlay on base map. The vertex illumination uses a similar technique as the vertex color on diffuse but instead, we put this map on the self illumination map. The default color of vertex is white. So if we use the vertex color map for self illumination, we first need to change all the vertex colors to be black.