Render To Texture tool

Introduction

The purpose of this tutorial is to explain briefly the principle of the Auto-Shading tool, available in latest versions of 3DS-Max (at least R5 is required). All the screenshots below have been taken from english R7 version.
The main interest of this technique is to create specular maps very fast to enjoy new games rendering engines features. It can also be used for create textures by applying this map as a shadow layer.
Just after the auto-shading point, few lines will be added about the TExporter plugin, very useful to create wireframe maps.


Step-by-step

  • Open the lightening scene
  • Set the environment background color to white color (0xFFFFFF)
  • Configure the advanced lighting properties of the rendering engine following this screenshot.
  • Merge your 3D model in this scene
  • Assign the material named mRenderToTexture to your object (see this picture). This material is simply built with 60 single white materials. If your model is made with more than 60 sub-materials, you should increase the number of sub-materials to match with your maximum number.
  • Select your object
  • Configure the advanced lighting properties of this object (Right click + Properties) following this screenshot. Note the unchecked "Cast shadows" setting.
  • Launch the Render To Texture tool located in Rendering menu
  • Configure the tool correctly following this picture. Please take care to set the Padding settings to something superior to 0 to be sure to cover correctly the whole shape. A good trick is also to render the bitmap in PNG format with alpha layer so the background will be rendered as transparent. Then, building your template will be easier.
  • Click the Render button and look at the result. This map has been created from this 3D model. The final result has been converted to JPG only for this tutorial. The original format was a PNG file with an alpha layer (see above).


    • Take care

  • The rendering process will create overlapping maps from all sub-materials assigned to your object. So, you need to detach each part of your objects depending on each sub-materials to finally get only one material per object
  • If your object is mapped on a non-square map (for example 512x256), you won't be able to generate a specular map with that size. So, I suggest you to create a 512x512 map with the Render To Texture tool and then to resize it with your usual graphical tool.


    • TExporter plugin

    Once the mapping is done on the object, it can be very useful in painting purpose to export the wireframe of the object to a single map. In the following example, we'll create a 1024x1024 wireframe map of the engine above.

  • First, you need to download and install the proper TExporter plugin, depending of your 3DS-Max version. The home of TExporter is Cuneytozdas.com.
  • After having launched 3DS-Max, you can add TExporter to the Utilities section.
  • While applying those settings, you should obtain this wireframe map. Here the ID of the material for this engine is #24. If several sub-materials are used for a single map, just select the needed faces and activate the "Only Selected" item.



    • 04-30-2006 - Render To Texture tutorial - v0.95
    Experience Le Mans : Virtua_LM