Tutorial - Creating shadows on your texture

[cR]

Requirements for this tutorial:

- 3D Studio MAX
- Photoshop

- Some basic knowledge of 3D Studio MAX and Photoshop.
- You allready have placed your track.

Step 1: Setting up the material

1. Open your track in 3D Studio MAX.
2. Open up the "Material Editior" and select an empty slot.
3. Set the diffuse color to pure white.
4. Set "Self-Illumination" to 15. Now assign the material to your track.

Step 2: Placing the light source

1. Use "MaxCalculator" to calculate where your lights should be placed in 3D Studio MAX.
2. Add an "Target Spot" in your scene, and set the target coordinates to XYZ 0,0,0 and the "Spotlight" to the coordinates calculated by "MaxCalculator", In my case XYZ 0,707.107,707.107.

Step 3: Setting up the light source settings

1. Select the "Spotlight" in your scene and go to it's parameters.
2. Check the "Cast Shadows" check button on "General Parameters" rollout.
3. In the "Shadow Parameters" rollout turn "Object Shadows" on, and select "Ray Traced Shadows" (Sometimes "Shadow Map" will have the same result depending on the coordinates of your lightsource, if so use it because it speeds up rendering.)

Step 3: Rendering

1. Go into top view and use "Pan" and "Zoom" to center your track to the viewport.
2. Open the "Render Scene" window and set the "Width" and "Height" to something big, make sure the cropped version of your rendered track is as big or bigger then your texture size.
3. At "Render Output" in the "Render Scene" window click the "Files..." button next to "Save File" checkbox, and select a directory to save your output to.
4. Hit the "Render button and wait till it's done.

Step 3: Adding the shadows to your textures

1. Open the output file you just made in Photoshop.
2. Use the "Magic Wand Tool" to select the black around your track and use "Select Invert" (ctrl+shift+I) so only your track is selected, now go to "Image > Crop" in the top menu. Now there's only your track left.
3. Go to "Image > Image Size..." in the top menu and set "Width" and "Height" both to your texture's size (960x960 for national and supercross, 1920x1920 for quarry, baja and enduro) and press the "Ok" button.
4. Select all and copy it.
5. Open your texture and paste the shadow as new layer, set blending mode of this layer to "Multiply" and "Opacity" to 80.
6. Save it and try it out in MCM2.

Notes

- The settings used in this tutorial might not exactly fit your track, just play around a bit with them to find the settings that fit to your track.
- The shadow layer in photoshop may have some dark edge lines, wich are easy to clean up with a brush.

The files I used

The displacement, texture map and shadow map,



The final texture,



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well my first ever finished tutorial, I hope it will be usefull to you.

[VMX_SKYmx99]

Very useful!  Thanks a lot man.  I have never been happy with my shadows, but I think I got it now.

[cR]

Should have asked me to help on msn bro! Haha good luck whit ur shadows man!

BTW, It's not just shadows but it also renders the lightning on the texture

[WhiteBoy]

"shadows" "lighting"=depth=whiteboy can see the beautifull terrain.

btw good lil tut for no pictures. its perfect for me to look at scince i havent made any shadows for months, mabey a year, scince one fix. but if u have ever used max n need justa  lil freshening up, this is perfect.


-bryan

[VMX_SKYmx99]

Put it to use whitey.... we need onefix 2 

[WhiteBoy]

i can tell u with confidence that that wont happen sky, sorry bro.prob wont ever see a track from me, im now considered a has been but its ok, cause this game is like how old... 5+ years. but i do have to admit, damn! this *#*#* still seems better than any other game due to the fact that twisted dirt keeps thinkin of new ways to add sik *#*#* to it.
what are some good new nats released in the past liek 6 months? any kind, i dont care i just wanna see soem good new nats...

[tw0_f0ur_]

i can tell u with confidence that that wont happen sky, sorry bro.prob wont ever see a track from me, im now considered a has been but its ok, cause this game is like how old... 5+ years. but i do have to admit, damn! this *#*#* still seems better than any other game due to the fact that twisted dirt keeps thinkin of new ways to add sik *#*#* to it.
what are some good new nats released in the past liek 6 months? any kind, i dont care i just wanna see soem good new nats...

humm i think 420 mad a sick rep of washougal. stc007 (steve) made a kool redbud track it was amature national qualifer nd redbud combined it wa sa sick track.. pauls (eldiablo) vmx motocross is sick.. theres alot more but i dont remember.. alotta new good creators. sky mx,myth,d-dub nd many more. WB you should upload al your nats at mcmfactory. I used  to enjoy playing them. Would be a treat to play them again. Thanks

[Metz]

ok come on whitey, what was that preview you sent me over msn?.. i think i still have the render?.. lol was indeed a while ago tho

[WhiteBoy]

ya that was an unfinished project, pile of shizer if u ask me but its all good i still have the env file n i play it now and than.

[WhiteBoy]

i know this is a really old topic but i need to know something.... I'm trying to render some textures in max but my shadows r coming up black. i have changed the shadow color but still... black shadows... any help? its been sooooooooooo long.

thanks,
bryan

[WhiteBoy]

just kidding i figured it out . rendering tab >environment> ambient lighting.

[22Ryann]

Whiteys back! yea buddy

[WhiteBoy]

hahaha back in mcm2 heck yeah buddy. good stuff. btw i rode mountainside motocross the other night for like 2 hours... good times.

[22Ryann]

I got mcm2 running on my new PC, man i must have been good at mcm2 back in the day, my tracks are so fugging hard to dial in, i used to make everything so narly big lol

i played King of the hill for hours the other night also, that thing is narly!


im hooked on MX sim tho lately!

[WhiteBoy]

yeah kith was deff part of my couple hour moto sesh, I'm having trouble finding all the old classics. i haven't tried plugging my joystick back in yet I've just been running keys on my laptop. its kinda weird to be back in ps, leveler, 3dsmax and dill again. especially on a max where some of the shortcut keys aren't the same and stuff. still adjusting to that.

mcm2 4 life,
bryan

[al167]

yeah mcm2 is just a great classic. i never made tracks or skins but i did download a heap back when it was popular. i just tried to install mcm2 on my windows 7 64 bit machine and it works but only with software rasterisation for the graphics (looks real bad and is unplayable with such bad graphics). if i select my graphics card when prompted(i had to change the registry settings to be able to be prompted), the game closes. i google searched and others are having similar problems. apparently it has something to do with the ram size has to be under 2gb. some guys are pulling a stick of ram out and others are changing settings - "MSCONFIG > Boot > Advanced Options" then check the "Maximum memory:" box and set the maximum amount to 2gb.Then reboot.
i havent tried either yet. does anyone have a better way as i dont really want to do either of the the above (i cant do the first because i have 2x 4gb sticks) just to play mcm2?

cheers allan

[WhiteBoy]

http://www.mcm2-v2.com/

theres a link on how to do it on the bottom of the page called windows7/vista. i haven't used it on my desktop cause i got an apple laptop and just loaded winxp using parallels..

bryan

[VRT_McD]

yeah mcm2 is just a great classic. i never made tracks or skins but i did download a heap back when it was popular. i just tried to install mcm2 on my windows 7 64 bit machine and it works but only with software rasterisation for the graphics (looks real bad and is unplayable with such bad graphics). if i select my graphics card when prompted(i had to change the registry settings to be able to be prompted), the game closes. i google searched and others are having similar problems. apparently it has something to do with the ram size has to be under 2gb. some guys are pulling a stick of ram out and others are changing settings - "MSCONFIG > Boot > Advanced Options" then check the "Maximum memory:" box and set the maximum amount to 2gb.Then reboot.
i havent tried either yet. does anyone have a better way as i dont really want to do either of the the above (i cant do the first because i have 2x 4gb sticks) just to play mcm2?

cheers allan

You mentioned the easiest way I've found yet, Win7 boots fast enough for this to work well.  I've got 12 GB, and there's no way I'm physically removing my sacred RAM.  I have these steps posted on my site:
■Go to Start > Search, and type in "msconfig". (C:\Windows\System32\msconfig.exe)
■Click on "msconfig.exe", go to the "Boot" tab, and click the "Advanced options..." button.
■Select the "Maximum memory:" check box, set the value to "2047″, and click OK twice.
■Reboot, and launch the game.

If I find anything easier or better, I'll post it here.

[Fixer]

You could always  just make another partition and install XP, it just won't use your extra ram and all your old games will play great.