Artwork Plugins for MAX 2010?

[MaineLines]

And an in-game shot after some texture refinement.

[MaineLines]

Being fairly happy with my results so far I decided to take the next step and add some shiny wheel treads. This turned out to be much more of an adventure than I expected. My first approach was to create a Max Multi Sub Object material and and assign two Kuju materials ( a shiny one and a flat one) as sub materials to it. That didn't seem to work as I could not get the Kuju materials to show in the viewport. The button to do this was always grayed out.

I then decided that I needed to assign a single shiny material to each wheel set that would allow me to mask out the areas that I did not want to be shiny. The Kuju material TrainSpecEnvMask seemed to be what I was looking for. As I understood from reading multiple descriptions on the internet, this is a two-slot material where the first slot contains a bitmap with the image to be applied to the model and an alpha channel with a bitmap who's whiteness determines the shinyness of the various parts of the main image, and the second slot contains a dummy bitmap (which can be the same as the slot 1 bitmap) which allows reflections from the environment to be applied to the model.

I applied TrainSpecEnvMask to my truck model and loaded my main bitmap with a grayscale copy of the image in the alpha channel into slots 1 and 2 of the material. The result was an all-black very shiny truck in RW. Not at all what I expected.

To try to isolate my problem I created three versions of my truck - one with no alpha channel, one with an all black alpha channel, and one with an all white alpha channel

TruckNoAlpha.jpg

TruckBlackAlpha.jpg[/attachment[attachment=0]TruckWhiteAlpha.jpg

Obviously I am missing somethig here.

[MaineLines]

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. It turns out that it is possible to make the Kuju materials sub-materials of a Multi Sub Object material in Max. You must be at the bitmap level in the material to activate Max's make visible in viewport button. I assigned TexDiff to all of the truck except the polygons representing the wheel treads and assigned TrainSpecEnvMask.fx (without an alpha channel) to the treads.

ShinyTreads.jpg

[Sly]

Hiya

Sorry not looked in for a couple of days.. glad to see you have got there.. it is looking great

Here are a few things that screwed me up a time or too

Yep multi materials is the way to go, I have up used up to 18 sub materials ... the only thing to watch is do not have a blank one within your set. it will screw up the export.

No alpha has the same effect as a pure white alpha

When using shaders that have multiple slots .. ensure that each slot is using UV channel 1 (mine defaults to 1,2, 3 etc )

Try altering the specular level in the lighting section for more or less gloss.. subtly different form the alpha way. I normally use specular value 3

Make sure UV1 arguments are set to 32 (or 64)

Good stuff

Sly

[nigelbpool]

where can i download the plugin as i have searched everywhere for it.