Real-World Scale We will make and apply a real world scale material. These are essential for architectural modeling. Set up the UI and defaults switcher to 3ds Max, ame-light. Customize/Units setup ... US Standard/Feet with Fractional inches, Feet as the default unit. Make a simple object, for example, a 15x15 foot floor that is 1 ft high. Hit M to open the Material Editor. In an empty material slot, name your material flooring. Hit the small gray box next to the word diffuse. Naviagate to fine a bitmap like stone, wood, tile, brick, etc. Drag your material to a model. Hit the show map in viewport button so you can preview your work. That's the little checkered cube icon in the Material Editor. Turn on the real world scale check box. Note the change in the dimensions -- it changes to 1 inch. Hit the view image button. Look at the image and estimate it's dimensions in real world terms, for example, 3 x 4 ft. Close the image preview. Enter your estimated sizes for height and width. Select the model. Add the UVW map modifier. Set to box (or whatever is appropriate to your model.) Check use real world scale. The point of this feature in Max is, you can be assured that the flooring is actually to scale with your model. This is very useful when you have images, for example flooring planks, that you know are a certain dimension, for example, 2x4 ft, or bricks, or tiles, that you know their actual size. Render, save as a jpeg, and print in Photoshop. |