Written by Jeff Patton Wednesday, 10 October 2007 14:14

Ever wished that you could take the great rounded corner option from the A&D material and apply it to other materials like the CarPaint material or Fast SSS skin material? Well, good news...you can.

First thing you have to do is open your "architectural_max.mi" file in your favorite text editor. Once open, scroll down to the "gui_mia_roundcorners" section and simply add a pound sign (#) in front of the "hidden" command. Here's a visual reference:



That's it really...simple eh? Well, with that task completed you'll now be able to access the round corners bump map inside 3dsmax (and outside the A&D material). Here's a few examples:

Round Corners applied to the Fast SSS Skin material (click to enlarge)


Round Corners applied to the Car Paint material (click to enlarge)

NOTE: Since the Car Paint material does not technically have a bump map I found that I could make it work by using a blend map. Just place your carpaint material in the Material 1 swatch, and the round corners bump map as the mask (and ignore the material 2 swatch). Presto-blammo, you now have rounded corners on your carpaint material.

More handy plugins:
If you haven't tried CrazyBump yet...you're missing out. It can easily make bump/displacement/normal maps for your favorite texture map. If you're like me, you have several nice diffuse maps, but no matching bump/displacement map...now I can quickly make one with CrazyBump!

Website: CrazyBump
Example test renders with displacement maps I've made using CrazyBump:

CrazyBump example 01 (click to enlarge)


CrazyBump example 02 (click to enlarge)


CrazyBump example 02 (click to enlarge)


Also, there's a new Ivy generator plugin that works directly inside 3dsmax here:
GuruWare

GW::Ivy (click to enlarge)


Actual Blog Entry:
How to: Unhide & use the round corner bump map on various materials