Sketchup Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material

3DS Max now features a new renderer known as Autodesk Raytracer, or ART. It’s a physical simulation of the way light bounces off of surfaces. It works in conjunction with a material known as the physical material. I’ve got that in the material editor already. We’ll open up slate material editor. I’ve got a standard diffuse white, and double-click on that to expose its parameters. It’s the familiar standard material. Then I’ve got a physical material. Double-click on that. You’ll see that it’s kind of reminiscent of the mental ray arch and design, including some presets. We’ll get back to that in a minute. In order to get a valid preview in this slate material editor we need to switch our renderer over to ART, because the physical material will render in the scanline renderer, but it won’t look right. It’s really only supported by newer and smarter renderers, such as ART, Iray, mental ray, and V-ray. Let’s go over to our setup. We’ve got render setup here. And swap the renderer out, instead of scanline renderer, let’s choose ART. We can close that dialog. Go back to our slate material editor. We may need to select these in order to refresh the swatch. And now we’re seeing them displayed in the ART renderer. That’s a standard material rendered in ART and physical material rendered in ART. We’ll now assign the physical material to all of the objects, so we can do a test render. In the perspective view just drag a selection rectangle around all of those objects. In the material editor select the physical material and then click assign material to selection. Now we can do a test rendering. Minimize the material editor. Click in the physical camera viewport to give focus to it.