3ds Max® 2012 Bible

CHAPTER 31

Working with Procedural Substance Textures

IN THIS CHAPTER

Applying Substance textures

Randomizing Substance textures

Substance materials are made possible using a Substance map type found in the Material Editor. Although using these Substance materials tends to produce materials that look the same as other material types, the procedural aspect of these materials makes them unique. Most materials with this level of detail require a bitmap texture, and the larger the bitmap, the better the detail. These bitmaps, even when saved using a compressed format, can easily run several megabytes in size. Procedural textures, however, are created using a code, and the result is file sizes that are usually measured in kilobytes instead of megabytes.

So the benefit to using procedural textures is that you can get the detail of an amazing material without the cost in file size. Another huge advantage is that you can easily make changes to the textures by inputting different values into the code. This gives you lots of variety without having to duplicate, reload, and save in memory several different bitmaps. For certain conditions, such as 3d for the Web or for games, these advantages are huge.

Selecting and Applying Substance Textures

The Substance textures feature isn't a whole new way of creating textures with its own interface and rendering engine. Substance textures work with the existing materials in the Material Editor, and unless you were looking for them, you might miss ...