How to win!
Welcome to MaxImmerse! This manual gives you information, hints, and tips on how to produce great content using 3D Studio Max, the MaxImmerse plugin, and NetImmerse, while avoiding choices that 3D Studio Max allows you to make but may slow your real-time content down. The manual provides background information useful for you to decide about geometric limitations, graphics card compatibilities, which visual effects work best with others and translate from Max to NetImmerse, and the best way to achieve an overall pleasing result. To Maximize your ability to create great content, it is a good idea to read the Artist’s Manual cover to cover, but it is also useful for quick reference. So let’s go. This amendment to the general artist’s documentation was written by an artist and is meant to give you some quick and dirty information about effects and processes when using MaxImmerse and NetImmerse in combination with 3D Studio Max. You will need to understand basic Max 4.2 principles to get the most from this as I will be going through basic tips and tricks on how to get some effects working in Max and exporting correctly into a .NIF file. You should also know a bit about 3d games. I will be using examples and referencing some work from the MadLab Demo so you may want to familiarize yourself and take a quick walk around to the different rooms there. The MadLab Demo can be found in SamplesMadLab. Go to the Material Editor. While Phong and Blinn materials are fully supported in MaxImmerse, you will get far more control by switching to the NetImmerse Shader under the Shader Basic Parameters dropdown of your material. The Material section: · Ambient and Diffuse colors work as they normally do in Max. The Diffuse color will affect your texture color so if you want only your texture values to show, set the Diffuse to white. The Specular highlight will only work if the flag is set to on and the shininess values is set just as you would with the Blinn or Phong shader. · The Alpha value controls the overall transparency of your material if you have no alpha map loaded. 1.0 is opaque. 0.0 is completely transparent. · Vertex colors must be flagged on to be viewed in NetImmerse. (For more on Vertex colors see above -“Shading with Vertex Colors”) · Apply Mode is most often Modulate while Replace will ignore all lighting and Vertex colors.