Stigatle.net

Hi,

 Thanks for reading these tutorials, I do appreciate comments and suggestions,
feel free to drop me a mail at ( Sastef[AT]broadpark.no ).

I decided to write this article as an introduction to realtime shading with 3dsmax.
The reason for this article is because I've just entered this end of 3d the past weeks.
I've gathered some knowledge and found tools that is easy and effective to use.
So I hope that someone else has use of this article.

 First off, the tools are free to use (Except 3dsmax):

• 3Dsmax 
• NVIDIA FX Composer 2.5
• MapZone 2.6

I assume you already have 3dsmax installed ;)
Install the rest of the tools, then make a simple scene in 3dsmax.
Just a simple plane, or a box.

What we will do now is to create a nice diamondplate shader, with reflections and bump maps.


Open the MapZone interface, you will be presentet with a preset browser looking like this:

 Browse to: "Materials->Sewer_plate0_4"

This gives you a preview of the textures in the right panel.

Now we need to export this one out in a format that we can use in Nvidia FX Composer.

Create a new directory on your drive, I chose "D:/Development/Realtime shaders/corrugated_sewer_plate/".

Click the "Export as bitmaps..." button in the ui:

It will then lists it like this:

Just click the "Export 1 texture set(s)".

It will then export them out to the directory you chose.

 It makes the following 2 files:

MaPZone[Sewer_Plate_04_diffuse].png
MaPZone[Sewer_Plate_04_normal].png

( Diffuse map is the colour, the normalmap is for bump\normalmapping. )

 Now the first part is done.

Step 2 is to open up NVIDIA FX Composer.

Start off by making a new project.

Enter a name, and click OK.

Add a plane to the scene:

Create the shader like this:

 Right click in the material window.
Select "add new material from new effect"

Choose HLSL FX shader:

choose the "blinn bump reflect"

click next, then finish.

Click on your newly created material in the editor on the left side of the screen.

the UI on the right side should change to this:

This is where we change our texture colours to test our shader on our plane.

Change the diffuce to "MaPZone[Sewer_Plate_04_diffuse].png"
Change the normalmap to "MaPZone[Sewer_Plate_04_normal].png"

you do this by pressing the little "..." button, then select "image" from the dropdown:

This opens a new UI where we add our maps:

Right click, select "add image"

Select the two images we exported, click OK.

The use the Diffuse as diffuse, and normal as normalmap.

keep the reflectionmap.

Now we want to test it!

Drag the "sphere" in the left top menu, to the plane we added earlier. (Just like in 3dsmax).

You will now have a nice looking shader with reflections and bump mapping, all in realtime!

 Now we need to export it!

Click the "rebuild all" button on the top, this will make the fx file.
It should be located at :

 "Your Documents\FX Composer 2\Projects\tutorial\"

 Let's bring all of this in to 3dsmax!

Create a plane, make a new material ( DirectX ):

Click the following button in the material editor, and browse to your FX file (note above):

 The user interface for the shader will change like this:

Now all we have to do is to fill in the missing info:

Diffuse texture
Normal map
Enviroment

We created two of these earlier, that would be:

MaPZone[Sewer_Plate_04_diffuse].png
MaPZone[Sewer_Plate_04_normal].png

For reflection i used: (included in the download)
sky_cube_mipmap.dds 

I've uploaded everything here, including a max file with it applied.

http://stigatle.net/uploads/realtime/realtimetutorial.zip

My result in 3dsmax:

Rotate the screen and see the reflections change etc.

Hope you liked this short tutorial! :)