Part 2: Texturing and lighting the Nissan R390 GT in 3ds max 5

Introduction
Creating a believable 3d model is strictly tied with an accurate definition of its materials and textures: realizing and correctly applying the textures on a model is a complex and long process in the creation of photorealistic renderings.
About the rendering process, i will simply descrive how to obtain a believable rendering in an exterior environment, and we will be greatly helped in this achievement by the new characteristics of the many global-illumination capable rendering engines.
Nowadays there are many rendering options to the average 3ds max user, from the built in “Light tracer” to 3rd party rendering engines (i.e. Splutterfish’s Brazil, Chaotic Dimensions’s Vray, Cebas’s Final Render). To add even more, the latest 6th release of 3ds max made many artist’s dream come true: the integration of Mental Ray 3.2.
The principles behind global illumination are common to all of this options, but interfaces and programmin algorythms differ quite a lot, bringing up confusion and differences in quaity and performance.
For the sake of simplicity i will discuss only the Light Tracer.
To complete this tutorial you will need 3ds max 5 (at least) and a graphic software like Macromedia Freehand or Fireworks (which was my choice), or Adobe Photshop or a similar software. I will not discuss the operations needed to paint in these softwares, but for our purposes we will just need a very basic understanding on how to create texts and shapes, so everybody reading this should be able to go through the process.

Section 1: Planning

Section 2: Materials

Section 3: Mapping and definition of UVW coordinates

Section 4: Painting and application of textures

Section 5: Creating the shaders

Section 6: Lighting and rendering

Section 7: Conclusions

DOWNLOAD: as a bonus you can get the bonnet model (3ds max 5) and the textures for this tutorial!