Rusty Metal

Those guys at 3DTotal have done it again!  They’ve uploaded 100 free rusty metal textures to their library for you to enjoy.  Make no mistake, they’re not seamless or massive like their for-sale libraries (which are also exquisite) but it’s hard to rag on something that’s free.  Head over and add a bookmark!

I’m back! Back with more delectable Monday Movies for you.

This week’s video tutorial is about how you can render very large images in 3dsMax. I mean really dang huge! Large renders in 3dsMax can bring just about any machine to it’s knees. I’ll show you how to split your render into pieces so that you can render them separately and then re-combine the images outside of 3dsMax using Photoshop or Gimp. The key is using the Blowup Region tool in the Viewport Configuration.

Enjoy!

Hey everyone,

This week, I’ll be showing you a trick I learned recently for rigging up inorganic objects to use the Look-At constraint in 3d Studio Max.  What makes this challenging is that sometimes your objects don’t have omni-directional rotation, so they need to be constrained during the rotation.  However, you also want to keep the robustness of the Look-At constraint.

Enjoy!

Hey all,

Don’t know if you saw this, but 3DTotal just uploaded a great new tutorial/walkthrough on creating 3d details through creative texturing.  I liked it because it really focuses on enhancing your details through texturing.  For those of you in the low-poly space, this is especially important to think about.

Enjoy!

Hey everyone,

This week is my 52nd Monday Movie!  We’ve done an entire year of bite-sized 3dsMax video tutorials.  How exciting!

In the video below, I’ll show you how to set up a DirectX material in 3dsMax.  This will allow you to get  much more powerful viewport rendering.  Your 3d objects will be able to respond (to some extent) to lighting through the diffuse map, specular map, and normal map!

Important: In order to follow along, you’ll need to download Ben Cloward’s 3-point lighting .FX file!  You want the one without transparency for this example.