3D Creative December 2015

3DCREATIVE MAGAZINE | ISSUE 124
Victoria creates one texture sheet for the ship and one texture sheet for the cables
Rendering the UV template, mask and AO map
Rendering out the maps: Before starting to paint the textures, I
04 render out all the maps I’m going to need. The first one is a template
for the UVs, which I’ll use in Screen blending mode in Photoshop as a
reference for the different objects’ placement.
Inside 3ds Max, apply an ‘Unwrap UVW’ modifier to the object and open the
UV editor, then under Tools > Render UV Template, a new window will appear
with the options for your render. Just put the correct size of the map and
click Render.
The second one I always make is a mask map, which I use in Photoshop’s
alpha channel to make quick and easy selections of the areas I need. I’ve
got this map in the same window as the UV template, but this time I change
some parameters to get the black-and-white image and save it as a TGA file.
Finally for the ambient occlusion (AO) map I use Faogen, a software that
make AO maps very quickly and accurately. Feel free to use the software of
your choice to make AO maps – the important thing is to have the occlusions
very visible in the map.
BPR Metalness/Roughness workflow: For this project I’m using
05 PBR rendering with a Metalness/Roughness Workflow. I need three
maps for this:
1. Albedo map, where the colors represent the albedo for non-metallic
materials and reflectance values for metals.
2. Metallic map, where white represents metal and the black represents
non-metal.
3. Roughness map, where white represents rough surfaces and black
represents smooth surfaces.
To learn more about the characteristics of each of the maps and take a
deeper look at the PBR workflow, you can look at the Comprehensive PBR
Guide by Allegorithmic.
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