Mapping bitmap image files

- [Voiceover] We saw in the previous movie how to apply a procedural 3D map. Now let's apply a bitmap or a file texture. And I've got one prepared already that is designed to exactly fit onto this particular object, which is a cocktail table. Let's load up the material editor with the M key on the keyboard. We've got a bunch of stuff in here already that's left over from the last demo. I can, of course, delete those. That's not gonna remove them from the objects in the scene.

Let's make a material to put on that cocktail table. And we're gonna go to the materials section, here it is. Let's make it a physical material, drag that over. Double click and rename it, we'll call it "cocktail table". And now we want to apply a bitmap or a file texture. And that's going to be found here in the maps section. Bitmap, bring that over. And as soon as we do that we get a pop-up dialogue asking what file do we want. Notice very importantly where it's taking me.

Current project, scene assets, images. And this is where all of your bitmap textures really need to be. If you place your bitmap textures into some other folder then it's extremely likely that you're going to have issues with broken links to your textures. When you apply a texture or a bitmap in a 3D program like 3ds Max, you're not actually encapsulating that information in the scene file. In other words, you're linking to an external file. And it's really important that 3ds Max be able to find that external file later.

And the easiest, best, and most logical way to do that is to keep all your file textures within the current project in this designated folder, which is scene assets, images. The worst thing your could possible do here is to start navigating to some other location on your hard drive and link to some random place. And that's a bad idea for a lot of reasons, One, it's extremely likely that the texture links are gonna get broken. It also means if you ever change the location of that file it won't be found.

You won't be able to move your project effectively to a different folder or a different computer. Just keep everything within the current project in the proper designated folder and you should be okay. Alright so if you do have issues with broken links I'll show you how to fix that later in a subsequent movie. I'll select the file I want which is cocktail_tableDiffuseMap.png, and click open. And we can make that bigger here if I double click. And you can see that it's got a peculiar layout.

Again it was created specifically for this one object. And if I try to apply this bitmap onto any other object it wouldn't wrap correctly. I wanna connect that to the base color, also known as the diffuse color. And now I'm ready to go, I can assign this. Select the object, and then assign to the object. Okay I've got my material selected and I can click on assign material to selection. And you'll notice that it changed color slightly, but we don't see the texture appearing on the surface.

And that's because a quirk of the 3ds Max material design and the viewports. Which is that if you want to see a texture on a surface, you have to manually enable it. And that's what we have over here. There's a button, show shaded material in viewport. That's a little bit misleading because we're already seeing shaded materials here. They're not wire frame, they're actually shaded. What this really means is show textures, show maps in the viewport. And before you click this, you wanna choose the appropriate node in your shading network.

If I selected the material and then click that button. Boom, we can see that bitmap appear on there. And if I had other maps, let's say I had a bump map or a specular map or whatever, if I select the root node or the material node and then click on show shaded material in viewport, I would see the combined effect of all of the maps here. If I wanted to see just one of them, I can select it explicitly here, double click it, and then click on that button.

Okay, so we've created our shading network for a bitmap, and we can take a look at that a little more closely. Let's convert this view to a perspective view. Use the P key on the keyboard and now we're looking through a perspective view instead of a physical camera. And then press the Z key to get closer. And we can see that the texture is wrapping very nicely on that surface. That's because I set that up in advance for this particular object. In a subsequent movie, I'll show you how to place standard bitmaps onto surfaces interactively.

So that's how you work with bitmap file textures in a shading network.