Very basic material tutorial?

Hi folks,

I'm relatively new to Max 8, I've just grasped materials, UV unwrapping and all that fun stuff, but now I'm moving to oFusion I'm a little confused.

I've looked at the example tutorials and they left me baffled: no obvious UV modifier on the car model etc.

I intend to model in with oFusion in mind from the beginning rather than converting meshes (i.e. not rely on Evaluate).

With this in mind, has anyone got any pointers as to where I start? I'm a little confused with Ogre Materials, Ogre Passes, oFusion Materials and the lot. Does a step by step tut exist telling me how I (for example) texture a cube, and see how different it is from normal texturing processes in Max?

If there's something of this sort in an obvious place and I've missed it, I apologise. Please give me a prod in the right direction and you'll get rid of me really quickly.

Thanks for any help!

the car has texture mapping, however it's not in a modifier- aka collapsed into the car. To see the mapping use the unwrap UVW mapping.

Your main point of confusion seems to be with UVW mapping versus materials. Objects may have many different UVW mapping layers, which are called 'channels'. For instance, you may have a box and 2 textures- a dirt texture and a bump map texture. Say you want to tile the dirt texture twice on the box and the bump map 5 times. You can of course edit the tiling options in the material, but that method is very dirty on account it will change that mapping on every single object. Alternatively you can add a UVW map modifier to the box with tiling set to 2 for channel 1 and tiling set to 5 for channel 5, then simply tell each map to use it's intended mapping channel.

Your best bet is desyphering ogre materials, passes, etc is to manually write a few in a text editor and see how they are shown in ogre.

You can also make a standard 3ds max material with a diffuse texture, then change it's type to ogre material- it'll ask if you want it as a submaterial- say yes, then there is a button next to it which will sort of convert it.

Thanks for the reply!

I thought materials were applied as a box/cylinder/sphere/shrink-to-fit map, OR a UV unwrap, and that was it. I couldn't tell which one was used to texture the car.

At the moment, I'm only the guy providing the assets - not the coder, so I'm just trying to make sure it all works. I'm used to using UV unwrapping for Ogre as I used to use the old Max exporter which insisted on it for exporting materials so this is all a bit strange to me.

I'll go through the tutorials again tonight and see if something clicks in my head, but anything else anyone can help me with would still be appreciated!

I thought materials were applied as a box/cylinder/sphere/shrink-to-fit map, OR a UV unwrap, and that was it. I couldn't tell which one was used to texture the car.


when you create a primitive it has an automatically added uvw map, say a cube has a cube map and a plane has a planar uvw map, but once you create complex objects, in order for the textures to look good and custom to that object custom uwv mapping is a must.

You were quite right about the UV mapping. It had been flattened into the mesh (doh!).

Now to figure out the material fun. Thanks!