Making Convincing Reflective Shaders in 3DS Max 7.5 and up using the Mental Ray Render

Now lets make the chrome ball.

-Choose a new material in the material editor and name it “chrome”.

-Next to the name click the standard swatch and choose shellac.

-Click “None” next to base material and choose Raytrace.

-For the diffuse use an ambient/reflective occlusion (base) shader with samples at 32, spread .9, max distance 90 and reflective checked. For the bright click the swatch at the far right and use a falloff map. Change the map to Fresnel and change the black to RGB 107, 107, 107.

-Click go to parent a few times to get back to Raytrace

-Go to maps and click the “None” next to reflect and use a falloff map. Change the black color to RGB 107, 107, 107 and use a Fresnel falloff type.

-Click go to parent once and then click the “None” next to the Bump in the maps rollout. Choose a dent map and label it “big dents”. Change the size to 777, strength to 5 and iterations to 2.

-Click “None” next to the white color and choose a dent map. Label it “small dents” and change the size to 100, strength to 3 and iterations to 1.

- Assign the material to a ball.

Finally, lets make the glass. Actually mental ray already has a good glass shader that we will use.

-Choose a new shader and label it “glass”.

-Next to the name click standard and change this to Glass (Physics_Phen).

-Change the phong coefficient to 62.

-Assign this shader to the last ball.

Note: To see something behind the glass push the checkerboard button on the upper right labeled background.

ADVERTISE

Lastly, lets set up the floor shader.

-Choose a clean shader and label it “floor”.

-Change the diffuse color to off-white.

-Click the swatch next to diffuse and choose an ambient/reflective occlusion (base) shader. Change samples to 32, bright to an off-white, spread .9, max distance 90 and check reflective.

-Click go back to parent and go down to reflection in the maps rollout. Change the amount to 10. Click “None” and choose falloff. Change the falloff type Fresnel

-Assign the material to the floor plain.

We are now done making all the shaders. Phew. :)

Lets set the render up to do a test render.

-Press F10 to open the render dialog box.

-Change the output size to 320x240.

-Go to the renderer tab and change the minimum samples per pixel to ? and the maximum to 4.

-Change the filter to lanczos.

-Go to indirect illumination tab. Open the final gather rollout and enable final gather. Change the samples to 50 and check preview (No Precalculations).

-Press render.