Texturing the House: More Mapping Techniques
 
 
 

The house is of stone, not of wood, but for the most part, the mapping techniques you use should be familiar from previous lessons. This lesson introduces a couple new techniques that can be useful.

Set up the lesson:

Texture the walls of the house:

The walls of the house present familiar techniques.

  1. On the main toolbar, open the Named Selection Sets drop-down list, and choose the house selection set.

    3ds Max selects the farm house.

  2. Right-click and choose Isolate Selection from the quad menu.
  3. Click an empty area of the viewport to clear the selection, and then click the House object to select the walls.
  4. In the Slate Material Editor, drag a new Standard material node to the active View, double-click it, and name the new material Masonry.
  5. Drag a new Bitmap node to the active View, choose masonry.fieldstone.jpg as the texture, and wire it to both the Diffuse Color and Bump components of the Masonry material node.

    Texture for the house walls

  6. Double-click the Masonry material node to see its parameters. On the Maps rollout, change the Bump amount to 90.
  7. Click (Assign Material To Selection), and then turn on (Show Shaded Material In Viewport). (If you use a legacy viewport driver, this button's tooltip reads, "Show Standard Map In Viewport.")
  8. Apply a UVW Map modifier to the house walls. Change the map projection to Box, and set Length = Width = Height = 5.0m.

    House walls with a masonry texture

Use a Mapscaler to texture the roof:

The roof, on the other hand, presents a problem. With its two gables, there is no straightforward way to map the pattern using UVW Map.

Shingle texture for roof of house

With default mapping (you don’t need to go through these steps, yourself), the texture doesn’t look right. Even if you were to adjust the scale or change the projection type, the shingles wouldn’t conform to the direction of the gables.

Default texture mapping for the roof

The solution is to use a different modifier, Mapscaler, to handle the texture mapping.

  1. Select the House-Roof object.
  2. In the Slate Material Editor, drag a new Standard material node to the active View, double-click it, and name the new material HouseRoof.
  3. Drag a new Bitmap node to the active View, choose shakes.weathered.jpg as the texture, then wire the new Bitmap to the HouseRoof material node’s Diffuse Color component.
  4. Click the HouseRoof material node to make it active.
  5. Click (Assign Material To Selection), and then turn on (Show Shaded Material In Viewport). (If you use a legacy viewport driver, this button's tooltip reads, "Show Standard Map In Viewport.")
  6. Go to the Modify panel. From the Modifier List, choose MapScaler.
    NoteBe sure to choose “MapScaler” from the list, and not “MapScaler (WSM)”. The world-space (WSM) version of MapScaler has a similar effect, but is not quite the same.

    The MapScaler modifier maintains the map scale relative to the object (in this case, the roof), and by default it wraps the texture so the shingles follow the angles of the roof.

    Shingle texture mapped using MapScaler

    TipNot all game engines recognize the MapScaler modifier, but if you apply MapScaler and then collapse the object to an Editable Mesh or Editable Poly, the texture mapping will be “baked in” to the model, and game engines will recognize the mapping.

Texture the windows:

The windows use another small feature to ensure correct mapping.

  1. In the Warning: Isolated Selection dialog, click Exit Isolation Mode.
  2. Click one of the purple windows to select it. The windows are a single grouped object named Windows.
  3. Right-click the viewport, and choose Isolate Selection from the quad menu.
  4. In the Slate Material Editor, drag a new Standard material node to the active View, double-click it, and name the new material HouseWindows.
  5. In the Shader Basic Parameters rollout, click to turn on Face Map.

    When Face Map is on, a texture map is applied to each face of an object individually.

  6. Drag a new Bitmap node to the active View, choose window.jpg as the texture, then wire the new Bitmap node to the Diffuse Color of the HouseWindows material node.

    Bitmap for the window texture

  7. Click the HouseWindows material node to make it active.
  8. Click (Assign Material To Selection), and then turn on (Show Shaded Material In Viewport). (If you use a legacy viewport driver, this button's tooltip reads, "Show Standard Map In Viewport.")
  9. In the Warning: Isolated Selection dialog, click Exit Isolation Mode.

Texture the front door:

Like the walls, the front door of the house is a straightforward texture mapping.

  1. Click to select the Door object.
  2. In the Slate Material Editor, drag a new Standard material node to the active View, double-click it, and name the new material WoodBoards (you will use it elsewhere in the scene).
  3. Drag a new Bitmap node to the active view, choose wood.boards.jpg as the texture, then wire the new Bitmap to the Diffuse Color of the WoodBoards material node.

    Left: Texture for the wood boards that make the house door

    Right: Bump map for the wood boards

  4. Drag a second Bitmap node to the active View, choose wood.boards.bump as the texture, and wire this Bitmap to the Bump component of the WoodBoards material node.
  5. Double-click the WoodBoards node so you can see its parameters, then on the Maps rollout, increase the Bump Amount to 70.
  6. Click (Assign Material To Selection), and then turn on (Show Shaded Material In Viewport). (If you use a legacy viewport driver, this button's tooltip reads, "Show Standard Map In Viewport.")
  7. Apply a UVW Map modifier to the door. Change the map projection to Box, and set Length = Width = Height = 4.0m.

This completes your texturing of the house.

The house with all its textures

Save your work:

Next

Mapping the Barn