Mapping the Barn

The army compound scene is nearly complete. The walls and doors of the barn use the same material you just created for the door, while the floor of the barn is the same as the barracks floors. The only difference is the roof of the barn: This also uses the WoodBoards material, but with a slightly different mapping.

Set up the lesson:

Continue from the previous lesson, or open army_compound04.max.

Use the front-door texture for the walls and doors of the barn:

Click the Perspective viewport label, and choose Cameras Camera03.
Camera03 shows a view of the barn.
Click the viewport label again, and choose Perspective, so any navigation you do won’t change the camera position or settings.
From the Material Editor, drag from the output socket of the WoodBoards material onto the barn walls and barn doors: the objects Barn, Barn-Door-right, and Barn-Door-left.
Press H to display the Select From Scene dialog. Select the Door object, then Ctrl+drag its UVW Mapping from the modifier stack to the barn walls and doors.

Use the barracks floor material for the floor of the barn:

From the Material Editor, drag from the output socket of the BarrackFloors material onto the barn floor.
Press H to display the Select From Scene dialog. Select one of the barracks floor objects, then Ctrl+drag its UVW Mapping from the modifier stack to the barn floor.

Texture the roof of the barn:

From the Material Editor, drag from the output socket of the WoodBoards material onto the barn roof.
Select the barn roof and apply a UVW Map modifier to it. Leave the map projection set to Planar. In the Alignment group, change the alignment axis to Y. In the Mapping group, change Length = Width = 4.0m.

Now the army compound scene is completely textured.

Render the completed scene:

Right-click the viewport label and choose Cameras Camera01.
Click (Render Production) to view the final results.

The fully textured field headquarters

Save your work:

Save the scene as my_fieldhq_finished.max.
You can see a version of the finished scene in army_compound_completed.max.

Summary

This tutorial has introduced a variety of methods for applying materials to objects. Among the methods shown were:

Applying a basic material to change an object’s color or shininess (the oil tanks and the fence piping)
Applying a 3D procedural map to create a patterned material (the generators and the sentry bar)
Applying a Diffuse or “texture” map to give an object a photorealistic pattern (the ammunition canister, the terrain, and almost all of the building surfaces)
Using the UVW Map modifier to control the projection, orientation, and scale of texture mapping
We also showed how to copy UVW Map from one object to another when the objects share the same material.
Using bump mapping to give a 3D appearance to a textured material (most of the materials on the buildings)
Using opacity mapping to make a material partially transparent (the chain-link fence)
Using the object-space Mapscaler modifier to project a map onto a complicated shape (the roof of the house)

What About the Vehicle Textures?

The jeeps and helicopter were already textured when you began working on the army compound scene. If you look at their texture maps, they appear to be a patchwork of different elements.

Left: Texture map for the helicopter

Right: Texture map for the jeeps

A single bitmap can provide the texture for a complicated object, provided you control its texture coordinates with a modifier called Unwrap UVW. This is the subject of the next tutorial, Controlling a Texture with Unwrap UVW.