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3DS Max Simple Web2.0 Material

This simple material makes a great car paint or could also be used for doing web 2.0 style designs. Every object in this test scene uses it, including the ground plane. This render was done with the Default Scanline renderer, and the only render setting I changed was enabling Raytracing Antialiasing, which I’ll briefly detail at the end of this tutorial. I used 3ds Max 9.

The scene itself is very basic, consisting of a ground plane, a couple objects, and 3 omni lights with default settings and no shadows:

The secret (if you can even call it that) to this great material is in the highlights and reflections, which give the material it’s characteristic carpaint qualities. To achieve this we’ll change the default Shader type from Blinn to Multi-Layer:

The advantage to using Multi-Layer is the double specular highlights (Specular Layers). Make the first lower and softer, and the second higher and sharper by using the Level and Glossiness settings:

Next (as you can see above) we’ll turn on Reflection in the Maps section, and adjust to control the reflectivity of the material. 10-30 is a good range for this, for a carpaint look. To the right of Reflection, click None and add a Raytrace material.

At this point we’re going to step away from the material editor for a second and head to the Render dialog. Hit F10 to open the render settings, and go to the Raytracer tab. Turn on the Global Ray Antialiaser:

We enable this for the reflections on the surface of our material, so they don’t appear jagged or blocky.

Okay, back to the material editor… Go into the Raytrace settings of the Reflection Map:

We can now enable the “Raytraced Reflection and Refraction Antialiaser” (say that 10 times fast, haha)

This will add the very nice photorealistic looking reflection to our material.

At this point, we’re done creating our material. All that’s left is to make note of a couple things:

• Make sure you have an environment, even a simple one. You need other objects to reflect onto your material for the best effect. For a simple studio setup, many artists will create a white plane or two and have them floating in the scene off camera, to give a nice rectangular window reflection like you frequently see on cartoon balloons. I didn’t do that in this case.
• Changing the color of the material is as easy as changing the Diffuse color at the top of the material stack. This is one thing that I like about this material setup, as I’ve seen quite a few carpaint materials where you have to dig through a bunch of material layers to change the color.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial – have fun!

Posted in 3d, Tutorials