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2013-04-16

Break up those panel reflections!

I'm going to share a tip on shaking up those reflections among panels.  I can't take credit for this, as the talented Pierre-Felix Breton brought this to my attention last year at AU.  I don't know how often I've seen this but often.

If you want to create a distorted reflection, then you add a noise map to the bump parameter.  Fine.  Unfortunately in 3d this map gets distributed evenly among all objects, making all the panels act/look like one single panel.



In real life however each panel has its own unique distortions and should look like this (I exaggerated the effect for emphasis):





Achieving this effect in 3dsmax is really easier than you think.  All you need to do is select a few panels, and apply a UVW Xform modifier to them.  In this example I selected every other panel.  The only parameter I adjusted was the "U Offset" amount (set to 1').  This simply shifts the previously applied maps to this modifers settings.


But there is a trick to getting this to work correctly with procedural maps such as the noise map.  Be sure in your noise map you change the Coordinates Source from Object XYZ to Explicit Map Channel, otherwise the UVW Xform doesn't know what to do with those procedural maps.

6 comments:

  1. Oh...thanks...you dont know how long I figth with that stuff..thanks so much (sorry 4 my english)

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  2. hahahaha... easy and useful, thank you bro @Ramy Hanna! hugs from Brazil!

    ReplyDelete
  3. unique your modifiers and run this script:

    mymin = -9999
    mymax = 9999
    for i=1 to selection.count do (
    selection[i].modifiers[#UVW_Xform].U_Offset = random mymin mymax
    selection[i].modifiers[#UVW_Xform].V_Offset = random mymin mymax
    selection[i].modifiers[#UVW_Xform].W_Offset = random mymin mymax -- for "XYZ to UVW"
    )

    ReplyDelete
  4. It is brilliant idea! So often i saw this problem, especially on glass buildings aka skyscrapers.

    ReplyDelete