CompuServe Messages

Neil, many moons ago I posted a suggestion that would encompass your #1 and then some. Yet, looking at 3DSMAX2.GIF in the Library which shows the Materials Editor for the new 3D Studio MAX, they not only didn't implement it, they didn't make ANY changes AT ALL to the Materials Editor as far as actual new capabilities go that I can see from that screen. My idea was to simply have a SCROLLING mapping table in the Materials Editor that works like Video Post or the Map Paths or Network Render dialog boxes: you can add and delete and move and copy lines up or down. Each line would look something like this: MAP TYPE | STRENGTH | MAP FILENAME | S | MASK FILENAME | S Clicking on MAP TYPE would pop down a menu of all the Mapping Types, including Ambient (see below), Diffuse (see below — the combination of these two is what we currently call "Texture"), Specular, Shininess (actually Shininess Strength), Self Illumination, Opacity, Bump, and Reflection, and maybe some others such as Refraction (assuming Ray Tracing is added), Metallity (see below), etc. MAP FILENAME and MASK FILENAME would call up the map file dialog box as now, while the two "S"es (the first would change to "A" if a MAP TYPE of "Reflection" was selected for that line) would call up the appropriate dialog box. The idea here is that you can have ANY NUMBER of maps for a given material of ANY TYPE, in ANY ORDER you want! They would be rendered from top down (like Video Post) so that ones below would take precedence over ones above as they would have a chance to cover them up, just as TEXTURE 1 and TEXTURE 2 do now. Why separate Ambient and Diffuse map types? Because months ago someone asked Gary Yost why 3DS materials looked so "plasticy." He responded that it was because too many people Locked the Ambient and Diffuse together when making materials. He said that blew the whole point of having a separate Ambient swatch. The proper way is to have the Ambient color either be a way dimmer and perhaps less-saturated version of the Diffuse color, or have Ambient be a color that is complementary to the Diffuse color for a beautiful effect (I forget the name he gave to that effect). He was quite right on all of this. But then someone else pointed out that the reason so many of us were locking the two was because the 3DS.MLI sample material library that came with 3DSr2 and r3 had those colors locked! Nearly ALL the materials in them did! Gary profusely apologized and said he had no idea why he did that and that he shouldn't have. I pointed out that since 3DSr"4" hadn't been released yet at that time, that Gary had a chance to "do it right" by making a new sample .MLI for that release that has the Ambient color properly used in those materials. He did, and you'll find that .MLI in your MATLIBS directory. The sample materials in the new .MLI do indeed look better and less "plasticy" than the old ones! However (and I did point this out way back then, too), this only works for materials that are NOT 100% texture mapped! Texture Mapping replaces BOTH the Diffuse AND the AMBIENT colors with the colors of the map! In 3DSr3, the then-new Materials Editor added a separate SPECULAR Mapping which allowed the user to specify a different mapping for the specular colors, but still had both Texture maps affecting Diffuse AND Ambient! Adding a separate AMBIENT map and changing TEXTURE to DIFFUSE (and fixing it so that it does not affect the AMBIENT area, at least not if a separate AMBIENT map is present) allows the same sort of realistic ambient effects for MAPPED materials that the Ambient color swatch allows for UNmapped materials! Combined with the RGB TINT and NEGATIVE buttons in the "S" dialogs, ONE map file could be used for both but with different settings to duplicate the effects of proper Ambient usage. Example: set the Red, Green, and Blue colors of RGB Tint to 128/16/16, 16/128/16, and 16/16/128, respectively, to cut the brightness about in half and also desaturate the resulting Ambient map a bit. Or, press the NEGATIVE button for the Ambient map and you have that beautiful complementary effect Gary described in a 100% MAPPED object! Yet, if you look at 3DSMAX2.GIF, you will see that the Diffuse swatch has an [M] (presumably for Mapping) button beside it, as does Specular, but Ambient does NOT. Gary, YOU jumped on us for locking Ambient and Diffuse all the time and then complaining that the materials looked "plasticy." YOU pointed out to us how to properly use Ambient. YOU built a new 3DS4.MLI for r"4" to show us how to do it right! And my Wish on this subject MONTHS ago was acknowledged! It did not appear in Release "4" but then again nothing DID that wasn't either a Plug In or something to make Plug-Ins more powerful. But now you have a whole new 3DS MAX for Windows NT, and it STILL doesn't have Ambient Mapping!? Actually, you really should implement that AND my idea of unlimited scrolling map list as above rather than having a "[M]" button after a few controls to show that they can be mapped. Windows makes such scrolling tables easier, both to program and to use. So there's no excuse for leaving it out. I mentioned a "Metallity" mapping type: this would be a grayscale map (like Opacity, Bump, Self-Illumination, Shininess Strength, and all the Masks) that would apply to any Metal object. Where the map is white, the material is treated as fully Metal. Where it is black, the material is treated as Phong. Shades of gray would render those pixels as both and then interpolate between their colors according to the luminance of the mapping pixel. This would allow masking to allow a single material to have multiple areas (like your checkerboard examples) that include both metallic and non-metallic areas, such as a chessboard that has both shiny metallic gold and waxed marble squares.