Making Convincing Reflective Shaders in 3DS Max 7.5 and up using the Mental Ray Render
-Click the “go to parent” button a few times to get back to the main material screen.
-Go down to the maps rollout and click “None” button next to reflections. Choose a falloff map. Label this “convincing reflections”
-Change the falloff type to Fresnel.
-Click the “None” button for the white color and give it a “Raytrace”
-Click the “go to parent” button to get back to the main screen.
-Press F10 to open the render scene dialog box. Go to assign render rollout and choose mental ray renderer.
Note: I skip to turning on the mental ray render about now because we need it to get access to the ambient/reflective occlusion (base) shader.
-Go back to the material editor and in the maps rollout click the “None” next to diffuse. Assign it an ambient/reflective occlusion (base) shader.
-Change the samples to 32, the bright to a red color (not overly saturated), spread to .9 , max distance to 90, and check the reflective tab.
-Click the “go to parent” button to get back to the main screen.
-Go to the top of the material editor and drag a copy of that red shader to the next material swatch. Label this one “convincing blue ball”.
-Change the diffuse color to blue.
-Click the “M” next to the diffuse slot to get to the ambient/reflective occlusion (base) shader.
-Change the red color to a blue color (again not too saturated).
-Do this same process again to make a black ball.
-Now that we have 3 colored balls lets apply them to the scene. You can do this by dragging the shader to the appropriate geometry or you can click the geometry and click the “assign material to selection” button.
