CompuServe Messages

In addition to the wishes JKJ gave for two-sided materials (actually that should be two-sided FACES, each side of which can have a different material, similar to the current BOX Mapping mode for Objects — there would simply be "Surface/Materials/Assign/Faces/Exterior" and "…/Interior" and "…/Both" commands — Exterior means the side of the face that is projecting the Normals and would do the same thing we have now, while Interior would apply materials to the other side of the faces, and Both provides an easy way to do two-sided materials on a per-face/element/object rather than per-material basis so that two-sided is only used where it's needed, speeding rendering without using up more of the precious 256-material limit [a limit which I hope will be either increased or better yet eliminated entirely in R5 anyway!] — such a change would NOT require fundamentally changing the way 3DS works!), other Materials wishes include the ability to have infinite Maps per material (multiple Maps of the same type, with a scrolling Video Post-type display handling the maps in the Materials Editor), and splitting Texture Mapping into Diffuse and Ambient Mapping (we already have Specular Mapping). Setting both Diffuse and Ambient Maps to the same bitmap with the same parameters would duplicate the existing Texture Maps, but being able to treat them separately would allow use of dimmer or contrasting Ambient colors for texture mapping as we currently have for non-texture-mapped materials (a technique that Gary Yost some time ago went into a big spiel about as being the proper way to add realism and eliminate the "plastic" look, resulting in the new 3DS4.MLI — yet we can't currently do this sort of thing with materials that require 100% intensity Texture Maps!).