Creating brick partly covered by mud with Composite material - 3ds max tutorial

PDF version: brick_tutorial.zip (enriched content)
In this tutorial, I will discuss how to create a brick material that is covered by mud. This is a technique that I recently discovered. This can be applied to other fields as well to achieve various effects.

1. Create a ProMaterials: Stone. Set the properties as the above screenshot shown.

 

  2. We have to tweak the value of the Output Amount a bit. The image of the brick texture will be thus become clearer. Set the Output Amount as 2.5.

 3. Create another material. Keep using the Standard. Then, insert a Mask map inside the diffuse slot. Insert the mud map and Noise map inside the Map slot and Mask slot respectively.

 

4. set the Output Amount as 2.0.

5. Adjust the size of the Noise map to 75. It determines the pattern of the mud.

6. Create a Composite material. Drag the brick material and mud material to the Base Material slotand Mat 1 slot respectively.

The final result

 The properties of those materials depend on the size of the target objects. You may play around with those properties so as to get the best results.

Importing blueprints - Tips & Tricks

It's important for everybody to learn how to import blueprints into 3ds max as many objects need blueprints to model. It's not a diffcult task but you need to be aware of the following points.

1.While cropping the blueprints into pieces, you mustn't leave any blanks in the margins. It affects the precision of the blueprints.

2. After importing blueprints to planes, make sure the coordinates of those planes are X:0 Y:0 Z:0. Then make some fine-tunning (e.g. moving the top blueprint upwards or downwards) to ensure the model can be view at all angles.

3. There should be no distortion. So, you have to pay attention to the size of the planes. Set the size according to the resolutions of blueprints.