YUDIbt

This is the second tutorial of my tutorial series on creating Gold Materials. For this tutorial you need to go through my first tutorial of the series; “Material solution for textured gold” because I am going to start this tutorial from at the place I have stopped my first tutorial.
From this tutorial I am going to guide you to convert that prepared gold material into an Antique Gold Material. However here I will not make any comments on making the environment settings, lighting and Render setup. I hope you will make these settings as same as in my first tutorial of the series.
For the easiness of the tutorial, I am using the same plane I have created in the last tutorial (with the dimension of 50 X 100) and same material created. However you will be able to use this in any complex model after successfully unwrapping its texture. Finally you need to be familiar with Photoshop in addition to 3D max to go through this tutorial.
And finally keep in mind this will not be a Photoshop tutorial, and I hope you are having enough experience in Photoshop to make the maps needed.
First go to the Gold material we have already created and remove the Noise map applied as Bump material. Now it will be looks like a gold coloured mirror.

Go to Photoshop and create a new Photoshop file (.psd) with same width to height ratio as your plain have. The size on the length and width will affect the quality of the final rendered image. If you don’t have a good idea of which size you should use, set larger values for length and width of the Photoshop file. That because if will be do no harm to the end result if you used Photoshop file with larger length and width. Otherwise you can use trial and error method to find the necessary quality of the Photoshop file needed.
I am going to use 512 X 1024 maps for all maps I am using. First I am going to make a bump map. For that first fill image with a middle gray colour (not too much dark or light). This will be the colour of the base level. Then mark the major coming outs from the surface using lighter gray colours and going downs using darker colours. You may use different colour levels for different height levels.
Save the file as bump.psd (you can use Photoshop files directly in 3D max). This is the map I am going to use.
Add little noise or cloud to the bump map so it will looks like an uneven rusted surface when apply.
Place your bump.psd file as your Bump map (if you don’t know how, please refer my first tutorial of the series).
Render and how it looks like (hope your having lighting, environment and rendering settings as same as in the first tutorial). By looking at the rendered image you can adjust the Bump amount as you need. This how my one looks like.
If you have followed my tutorial without any mistake, your result should be a shiny new gold coloured nameplate. For our purpose we need to make it older to give an antique look. However it is already having an uneven surface due to the noise we added to the bump map.
Open the Material Editor and drag the gold material we used to another material slot. Change the name of the material to “Dirt”, or any other you can easily identified. Apply the new Dirt material to plane (yes replace the existing Gold material). Now we are going to change the Dirt material as we want.
Go to Raytrace Basic Parameters rollout of the Dirt material and do the following changes.
1. Unselect the Reflect option
2. Change the Specular Colour to (R=49, G=49, B=49)
3. Reduce the Specular Level 13 (nearly)
4. Change the Glossiness to 0

Now we need make a Diffuse colour map. For that, go to Photoshop and make a .psd file with same dimensions as bump map (mine was 1024 X 512). You can use your skills to make the map as you like. As I mentioned at the beginning, I am not going to teach you Photoshop here. However I recommended to always use .psd files until you completely finished the project. It will give you full flexibility when changing the textures. This is the Diffcuse map I am going to use.
Go to Maps rollout of the Dirt material and set prepared dirt map (the Photoshop file) as your Diffuse colour map. If you like, you can render and see how it looks like.
Don’t worry if got bad result; I also got very bad result. No need to change the map at this stage. Believe me, It will not do any significant difference to your final result (I am also not changing my Diffuse map anymore).
Select an unused material slot and replace the Standard material with a Blend material. If it asked to replace the existing material, allow to do so by Discarding existing material.
Now you will get different set of parameters under Basic Parameters (Blend Basic Parameters) Rollout. Drag the Dirt and Gold materials from their material slots into Material 1 and Material 2 respectively. Now you have to make a Mask map using Photoshop. Use the same sized map as you used early.
Here I would like to add a word on Mask map. Better to use Greyscale map, because RGB colours will add no value to Blend map. I recommend you to make your mask map on top of the Bump map you have already prepared. (save your Bump as “Mask.psd”, collapse all the layers to single layer and use it for make Mask map.)
This Mask map I am using.
Place your Mask map as Mask under Blend Basic Parameters.
Now the job is completed. Because we have already set other settings, we can directly go for rendering. Render and see how the end result looks like. I have given my final result below; compare the results you got with my one. Hope you will get better result than my one.
Here is one example project done using Antique Gold material – The Ancient Dice
Hope you have enjoyed my tutorial. Please send your comments on this tutorial, so I can present better tutorial for you in the future.
Tell me if you have faced any problem when you following this, I would like to help you.