Attached Link: Atomic Knights

This bridge was made in Max and is heaviely inpiried by the painting "In search of forever" by Rodney Matthews. It is one 3ds object ; with 3 bitmaps. Still the bridge looks to artificial. What can be done to make this look more realistic ? Is it possible to add different Vue materials to the bitmaps without splitting the bridge back to parts ?? Please give comments, every hint can be usefull.

I don't think it looks bad at all. Sharen

well... what's it supposed to be made of? if it's gold, it needs to be shinier and reflectier. if you want realism, you could try putting a stone wall vue material on it....

I see what bloodsong meant. it looks like a very hard yellow plastic as it is, and either needs more reflectivity, or shininess, or a combination, in order to look more real. As for the modeling though, it's very good. it's not possible to take certain segments of a Vue .vob model and map them. The mapping regions have to be defined within the model itself, prior to import. You can do that with UV Mapper, or you can manually edit an entire bitmap image texture itself as a whole to your wishes, but in Vue, there is no way it is possible to cross object boundaries with partial mappings.

What a beautiful bridge, Holli! Well done! and yes, if it is meant to be gold, it needs more of a golden metal appearance. With metallics on very smooth objects, it usually helps to add a slight bump, like a simple Fractal function at a low gain. It helps the material "catch the light" and appear more metallic.

You can break it up in UV Mapper and make a texture map for it. That should keep you from having to chop it up. You can essentially do that in UV Mapper. You can assign materials to different parts too if I'm not mistaken. But I don't really do that, just map stuff. Mike knows about assigning materials...maybe he'll show up and give you a little clue ;). Laurie

Woops...guess I should read everything...LOL!! Mike already beat me to it, but he didn't explain much ;). C'mon Mike...how's it done? ;P Laurie

1. Edit>Select>By Group 2) Edit>Assign>To Material 3) Name the material 4) UV Mapper complains that it doesn't exist and asks do you want to create it? Yes. OR: You can use your mouse and draw a selection around any part of the model. It will highlight in red and you can assign that highlighted area to entirely new materials and/or groups, essentially breaking the object up. You can also enlarge the selected area and remap it, For example, maybe your model as a whole is mapped "planar", but you want a certain material in it to be mapped "box". With the area selected, you go, Edit>New UV Map and make a selection. 5) Do that as much as necessary, and save the model as .OBJ Also, you can Select>By Material and Assign>To Group. Or you can re-assign a group or a material. Or assign a whole lot of objects to one individual material I'm imagining the whole ordeal will be much easier with UV mapper Pro. And I do mean to call it an ordeal, because when you have an object with alot of parts, it can take quite a while and you really have to pay close attention to where you are and what you're doing. I made a posable ceiling fan model, and it took me about an hour in UV mapper to get it all mapped and assigned, but I made a mistake, realized it and had to start all over again. UV Mapper has no "undo"......

It needs a slight bump texture to keep it from looking like plastic. You can also use rocks and plants and bushes to hide where it meets the grass to make it look more natural. I sometimes touch up such spots by hand in photoshop but if you do it right it's unnessesary. Also don't forget about mixing materials. You can do a lot with environment blending. You also might want to try to make a road less traveled with something simple and small that you can place lots of to make a good looking path. I like it. Don't give up yet.

thanks for all the comments I'll let you know when it's improved