- [Instructor] In a 3D program like Max,
there are essentially two types of maps.
A file map is an image stored on disc
and a procedural map is some algorithm
or little mini program that generates an image
within our 3D application.
I've got a procedural map here.
It's an OSL uber noise
and it's driving the bump map of my paint material.
We can see in realistic mode in the view port,
we're getting this bump effect.
Also notice we're only seeing the bump map input
on this material.
I've hidden all of the other inputs
in order to reduce clutter.
We can turn that on or off
by selecting a particular node or nodes.
We can go into the view menu of the material editor
and we can enable or disable hide unused node slots.
And the keyboard shortcut for that is H,
so we can turn that on or off.
Additionally, you may notice
there's a little circle with a slash through it
in the lower right of my preview.
What I've done here is I've disabled
automatic preview generation
and that's to avoid performance issues.
The OSL uber noise map is kind of complicated and slow.
If we make changes there,
the material preview update will be sluggish.
I've set this up so the material sample
will only update manually.
Right click on that sample
and we'll see that auto update preview is disabled.
If I want to force the update, I can choose update preview
and that will manually re-render the preview.
All right, let's talk about procedural maps
such as the uber noise.
When designing a procedural map,
we select it, we'll see we've got lots of cool parameters.
When designing that map,
it's helpful for us to know what the size of this sample is.
I'll make this node a little bit larger,
expand that preview.
So the question at hand is
what are the dimensions of this sample?
Does that represent a square centimeter,
a meter, a kilometer, or what?
We need to know this so that when we design the map,
we have some point of reference for scale.
To change the scene scale of the material editor sample,
we need to go into the compact material editor.
This is one of the rare times you'll need to do that.
Go to the modes menu,
switch over to compact material editor
and then in the material editor menus,
choose options, options.
And here we have the material editor options
and there's a parameter, render sample size.
That's the size of a render sample
or preview in scene units.
Let's change this quite a lot
so we can really see the difference.
I'm going to bring this way down to a value of 0.05 meters,
which is five centimeters.
And by the way, just right below that,
you'll see there's a parameter labeled default texture size.
You can ignore that because it has nothing to do with this.
It does not affect the sample size.
This has to do with a special type of mapping
called real world size.
This parameter sets the real world size
for newly created textures
and it does not apply in our current situation.
Okay, I've set the render sample size to 0.05 meters
or five centimeters.
I'll click okay and switch back over to slate.
Go to modes, slate material editor.
And that render sample size parameter is a user preference.
It's not stored in the 3DS Max scene file
and more crucially,
the rendered preview in the material editor
does not automatically update,
even if you choose file reset to reset the program.
If you change that render sample size parameter,
you'll need to manually refresh the preview.
Right click on that sample
and from the popup menu, choose update preview.
Now we see a sample that's only five centimeters on a side.
And if we dolly in on our perspective,
you get in real close with control+alt+middle mouse
until we've zoomed into a scale of centimeters.
We can see that the bump map on the wall
corresponds to this cellular pattern
that we see in the uber noise map.
Okay, that's just for demonstration purposes.
I don't actually want to be zoomed in that close
so I'll dolly back
and I'll set my sample size to something more reasonable.
We'll go back into modes, compact material editor,
back into options, options.
Let's set this to 50 centimeters or 0.5 meters.
Click okay and go back to the slate material editor,
modes, slate material editor.
Once again, manually refresh that sample.
Right click on it and choose update preview.
Now we've got a sample that is 50 centimeters on a side.
That's going to give us a better idea
of what we're working with
when we adjust the parameters of our procedural map.
That's how to set the render sample size preference.