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Chapter 18: Creating Compound Materials and Using Material Modifiers

Tutorial: Mapping die faces
As an example of mapping multiple materials to a single object, consider a die. Splitting the cube object that
makes up the die into several different parts wouldn’t make sense, so you’ll use the Multi/Sub-Object mate-
rial instead.
To create a die model, follow these steps:
1. Open the Pair of dice.max file from the Chap 18 directory on the DVD.
This file contains two simple cube primitives that represent a pair of dice. I also used Adobe
Photoshop and created six images with the dots of a die on them. All of these images are the same
size.
2. Open the Material Editor and double-click on the Multi/Sub-Object material from the Material/
Map Browser. Then select the material node and name the material Die Faces.
3. In the Multi/Sub-Object Basic Parameters rollout, click the Set Number button and enter a value
of 6.
4. Name the first material face 1, and click the material button to open the parameter rollouts for
the first material. Then click the map button to the right of the Diffuse color swatch to open the
Material/Map Browser, and double-click the Bitmap map. In the Select Bitmap Image File dialog
box, choose the dieface1.tif image from the Chap 18 directory on the DVD and click Open.
5. Back in the Material Editor, return to the Multi/Sub-Object Basic Parameters rollout and repeat
Step 4 for each of the die faces.
6. When the Multi/Sub-Object material is defined, select the cube object and click the Assign
Material to Selection button.
Note
Because the cube object used in this example is a box primitive, you didn’t need to assign the material IDs to dif-
ferent subobject selections. The box primitive automatically assigned a different material ID to each face of the
cube. When material IDs do need to be assigned, you can specify them in the Surface Properties rollout for edit-
able meshes. n
Figure 18.6 shows a rendered image of two dice being rolled.
Tip
If you enable the Views ➪ Show Materials in Viewports As ➪ Standard Display with Maps menu command, then the
subobject materials are visible. n
Using the Clean MultiMaterial utility
All compound materials have submaterials that are used to add layers of detail to the material, but if these
submaterials aren’t used, they can take up memory and disk space. You can locate and eliminate unused
submaterials in the scene using the Clean MultiMaterial utility. This utility can be accessed from the Utility
panel by clicking the More button or from the Utilities menu in the Material Editor. For example, if you
create a Multi/Sub-Object material with seven submaterials but later as you are modeling find that you need
only five, the two unneeded submaterials can be cleaned.
Clicking the Find All button finds all submaterials that aren’t used and presents them in a list where you
can select the ones to clean.

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