Basic Texturing

So first of all i opened a pre made cube and selected the material editor, you need to hold down left click to access a drop down menu and then you need to select the first one, a window will then pop up which will be your material editor.

Then i selected the first sphere and re-named it to crate, this is just simply for ease of use when working with lots of materials. I then selected the object that i wanted to actually texture so i selected the cube and then a clicked the grey box next to the diffuse colour. 

Next a menu will show and i simply selected bit map and then a windows menu pops up and i selected the texture that i wanted to apply to the model. so then the texture is imported to the material editor but does not show up, to get it to show on the object you simply select "assign to material" and then the "show shaded material in view port"  

I then selected the second sphere to add the next texture and this time i am going to texture the floor and simply repeated the same process but this time i obviously selected a different texture (black and white checked texture for a tiled floor)

Now however these tiles are to large and so i am going to add a modifier to the floor named UVW Map,

Then i went to the parameters in the roll down bar and changed the U Tile and V tile both from 1 to 5.

After that i then opened Photoshop and imported the crates texture. I am going to alter it so that it is not the exact same texture across the whole box, this will give the box a more realistic look,

As you can see i have added two more panels to the top and bottom of the box and i have also placed text over it.Then to add a little more realism i used the burn tool towards the bottom of the crate to show a bit of shading and fading of colour by simply using the burn tool.

So now i am going back over to 3Ds Max and i am now going to import the new textures that i just created in Photoshop, however this time when i select the third sphere i am not going to keep it as a standard material and instead i am going to change it to a "multi sub object" this is done by selecting where it says standard and selecting multi sub object in the pop up menu.

 Now i have a list from 1 to 10 which i am firstly going to change to 4 as i only have 4 textures i wish to use for this object. So i simply click select number and type in my desired number.

Now by selecting either where it says "none" or "crate side one" it will return me back to the familiar menu where i can select the material again, then when i want to come back to the list of materials that are in this sub object list i simply select "go to parent" and i can select the second texture to import into the list. so now I am going to add all for of my textures into each of the four spaces in the list. However once i have done this and select show shaded material in view port (make sure to do this for all materials in the list before going back to the list view) you can see that not all of my sides are textured or they are not the right texture (in some cases)

To fix this and to select the texture i want for each side individually I simply add the modifier "edit poly" to the cube and then select the sub object "polygon". Now i can select the individual polys (faces) making up my cube, so now if i scroll down the roll down bar and find the subtitle "material ID" i can now set which texture i want to show on my selected poly by changing the number to match the number in the list that has the texture desired linked to. 

So this basically shows that making one of the materials (spheres) a multi sub object it basically creates a hub for you to import all the textures for a single model which you can then link to a number (ID) and then select the poly and link it to the ID giving you more precision and ease of use when texturing bigger and more complex models.


This is a render of the finished and textured crate.