CompuServe Thread

Hey there Kevin. Thanks for your reply. Your question about wood is excellent. I prefer to use SXP's to get a realistic looking wood. I use Wood.sxp as texture one and one of my routines, Turb.sxp as texture 2. Now don't let SXP's confuse you. They're not as complex as they seem. First look at the grandfather clock. Which way would you like the wood grain to be? Would you like too see the grain going left to right or top to bottom? If you want your wood grain going left to right, then it is going along the X axis of the grandfather clock. I find the easiest way is to use the wood textures in the 3DS matlib. Apply them to your objects first and don't worry about mapping cords. Then go into the materials library and get material from scene. Now texture one… Load up wood.sxp. Click you mouse on the little S next to the texture. This S stands for setting. Now set the parameters for the wood.sxp. Since you'll be the one to determine which way the grain goes I'll give you an example for both the X and Y texturing. Notice you have a size setting, R1 and R2. You also have 3 setting boxes at the bottom. These are your X,Y,Z cords. Then your colors one and two. Now click on color one. Notice it's a brown color. Match this color to the brown in the bit mapped image used with the original wood texture. Now click on color two, notice it's black. Change this color only if you want the grain to be any other color then black. I find R,15 G,3 and B,2 on the color set works well. Next step is to set the X,Y,Z cords. If you want the grain running left to right increase the X value. I think somewhere between 3 and 9 works well. You want the Y cord to be 0 or something like .3. Then Z cord, you might want to work with this one, but I find that a number like .5 works well. For the settings R1 and R2 I use R1 .3, R2 5. Now the trick is setting the size. I find that if you created your object in real world size, it makes life easier. If your grandfather clock is 8 feet tall, I would use a size between 1 and 5. Now set the wood.sxp texture amount between 30 and 45. Load up Turb.sxp into texture 2. This is the easy one. Starting with the colors. Set the colors to the opposite of wood.sxp Color one will be your dark wood tone and color two will be light. Remember, as I said before, the easy way is to match the colors used in the original wood texture assigned to the object. The colors you'll need to match are ambient and specular. Now that you've chosen your colors, you'll need to set the the X and Y cords. Again, depending on the way you want the grain. X for left to right and Y for up and down. An amount of 130 on the X cord should do fine. You'll notice other settings… ignore them. Now for the size. For a real world size object, a size of 10 to 40 will do. Finally texture amount, you want Turb.sxp with a higher setting than the wood.sxp so I would say from 80 to 95. You want Turb.sxp to stand out more, then wood.sxp. You actually can make a good wood texture by just using Turb.sxp but Wood.sxp and Turb.sxp are a great marriage. You may have to tweak it a little bit, especially on sizing to fit right, but you should get the hang of it. I find render last is very helpful for sizing and tweaking. I will also put a material libary on line for you and others to look at, containing examples of woodsy textures created with wood.sxp and Turb.sxp. Kevin, I know this is a lot of info… Don't sweat it. If something doesn't make sense, get back to me. Later…