TP Multi/Sub Material

 

image79.gifWhen doing crowd scenes or massive particle effects in general, texturing and coloring becomes a real challenge for the animator.

Assigning a different color or texture to each individual object is impractical and time consuming. thinkingParticles offers a special material type that helps in conquering this challenge and ease the pain of texturing 100 or even thousands of characters in a scene. Please note that the TP Multi/Sub Material behaves exactly the same like a standard Multi/Sub material except that internally thinkingParticles does the housekeeping and database management of multiple textures created with this material type! Do not get confused with the standard Multi/Sub object material of 3ds Max that looks similar to the one from thinkingParticles.

To access/assign the TP Multi/Sub-Object material you would proceed as you would with any other 3ds Max material. Open the Material Editor and from the Material/Map browser dialog choose the TP Multi/Sub-Object material.

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Material Map/Browser

 
 
TP Multi/Sub-Object Material 

There is not much to explain about the material and its use with thinkingParticles. The only important thing to note is that if you use the TP Multi/Sub-Object material, all the randomization and automatic assignment to objects in the scene are handled through this material.

Every object in the scene, that has this material assigned will automatically be able to "spread" the materials in the list to other objects that are created by the Geometry-Instancer of thinkingParticles.

Find below an example of a crowd scene setup. The TP Multi/Sub-Object material carries 3 sets of sub materials which are made out of standard 3ds Max Multi/Sub Materials. Each material set is used on a single character and thinkingParticles will randomly cycle through the materials 1-3 when creating an instance of an object as a particle.

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TP Multi/Sub-Object Material


Below you'll find the standard 3ds Max Multi/Sub-Object material that was initially used to texture the character. By copying this material into the TP Multi/Sub-Object material slots and changing the parameters a range of 3 totally different character types can be easily spread in a scene.

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Once again, keep in mind that the TP Multi/Sub-Object material must be the main material you assign to a character. Within the Multi/Sub-Object material you will be able to set multiple variations of the material that will be spread automatically in the scene.