Archives for the 'Tutorials' Category
Tutorial: How-to Create Seamless Texture Patterns
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Creating repeatable patterns is a great skill to have in your toolbox. The technique is a must for creating 3D textures, but can benefit graphic design needs as well.
It’s easy to find a pattern, but not so easy to find one that can be tiled without some work. Usually this is the case:
If you tried to tile this, it wouldn’t work. There isn’t enough of the pattern shown to line up the repeat end to end. Fortunately, there is enough pattern throughout the image to create a full repeat -it just needs some re-arranging.
Tutorial: Strong Glares using Camera Shaders
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
This tutorial will show you how to add realistic lens glares to your renders using 3ds max, Mental Ray, and Photoshop. I’m going to assume that you already have a scene to use that has any bright reflections, highlights, or exposed lights.
The best glare I have been able to produce is through using Lume Tools‘ glare camera shader. This shader ships with 3ds max (I am using 3ds max 9), however, it needs to be unlocked before you can see it in the material browser.
-So let’s unlock it:
Browse to your mental ray shaders folder: “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 9\mentalray\shaders_standard\include”, and open “lume.mi” in notepad.exe (be sure to make a backup before editing anything). Once you have it open do a find for ‘glare’, and put a ‘#’ next to ‘hidden’. Save the file and fire up 3ds max.
Tutorial: Creating Photo-Realistic Renders with HDR using 3ds max & Mental Ray
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
The technique I use to create photo real product image renders is called Image Based Lighting (IBL). There are no lights in the scene, all of the illumination is provided through the HDR texture map. The images above are some recent 3d models I have rendered using Image Based Lighting with an HDR map I created. I have this HDR image probe available for a free download as you go through the tutorial.
First thing you want to do is start with a fresh scene and merge in the object that you want to render. I’m going to use a wall sconce that I modeled recently. If you don’t have any 3d models off hand, just create a few spheres or a teapot and apply a shiny or glossy shader to them. Try to keep a realistic scale to them, for instance, give them a 3-6″ diameter. This goes for any model that you merge in -make sure it has a realistic scale. If you don’t already, everything you model should be to scale. It helps textures, lighting, and cameras play nice together -not to mention adding realism.
Tutorial: How to Make a Shiny GUI Icon in Photoshop
Friday, January 11th, 2008
This icon is designed in the popular shiny style that we all know and love, possibly hate. It’s heavily influenced by Apple’s iPhone icon and GUI environment.
The icon shown here is for a “settings” control, hence the gear-clock, and muted colors. It’s shown in both the off and on state.
There are two main elements that make up this image; the icon button, and the icon graphic. The icon button is the common element that gives all the icons in a GUI a consistent look -think of it as the background. The icon graphic is the part that visually describes the purpose of the icon. This tutorial is about the icon background.
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