3D Movie Maker

I mentioned in my previous post that I needed some chalk cliff face to line my pit and cover my cliffs.

Here are the steps I followed:-

Opened Bitmap2Material program.

The following sequence of actions is numbered as per the image above.

1. Dropped a jpg image of a section of chalk cliff face into the top left panel.

2. Adjusted parameters as desired. There are a lot of these and this could easily collectively take longer than the rest of the operation. For now I left them at their default values.

3. Selected: Export as Bitmap.

4. Set: Start = 1f / End = 1f / Count = 1f. I didn’t do this the first time and ended up generating over 1,000 bitmap images.

5. Ticked the Maps I wanted to generate: Ambient Occlusion, Diffuse, Normal, Opacity, Specular and then Set the Destination Directory.

6. Pressed the Export button.

Opened iClone5

Selected an object (e.g. terrain, prop etc.). I used a box.

Set the Texture Setting Maps to the ones I had just generated in B2M.

Some of the terminology is not the same between B2M and iClone. They translate as follows:-

B2M	iClone
Diffuse	Diffuse
Normal	Bump
Opacity	Opacity
Specular	Specular
Ambient Occlusion	Blend

Saved the Material.

Whoopee – I can now make as many Materials as I want. The advantage is that instead of just having a collection of flat image textures that can be diffused onto a surface, the material files generated with B2M include the other maps such as Bump and Specular, which give the material more life and much more of a 3D feel.

Now I feel I can get back to my project and that these little diversions should produce a better quality result.

Tony

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