8

Combustion Map 1449
Only Combustion 2.1 and later formats are supported.
Maps in the Combustion 1 format are not supported in
3ds Max.
Impor tant: The
mental ray renderer (page 3–77) does
not supp ort the Combus ti on map.
See also
CWS (Combustion Workspace) Files (page 3–660)
Noise Rollout (2D) (page 2–1439)
About the 3ds Max and Combustion
Integration
You can use Combustion as a material map in
3ds Max. With a Combustion map, you c an create
a material from a Paint or composite operator ,
and in turn apply that material to objects in a
3ds Max scene. The Combustion map can include
Combustion effects, and it can b e animated.
In addition, with Combustion you can import
3ds Max scenes that have been rendered to a
rich
pixel file (page 3–681)
( RPF (page 3–681) or
RLA (page 3–680) file). The imported rich pixel
rendering becomes an element of your composite.
You can adjust its 3D position relative to video
elements of the composite, and you can apply
Combustion 3D Post effects to objects within
it. See the
Combustion User’s Guide for more
information.
Note: B e cause 3ds Max runs only on Windows, you
cannotuseCombustiontocreatematerialmaps
onaMacintosh.
Note: The environmental atmospheric effect
knownas"Combustion"inversionsof3dsMax
prior to v4 is now known as the
Fire effect (page
3–272)
.
3ds M ax Materials and the Combustion Map
In 3ds Max, a
material (page 3–1065) is data that
you assign to the surface or faces of an object
so that it appears a certain way when rendered.
Materia ls affect the color of objects, their shininess,
their opacity, and so on.
The
Material Editor (page 2–1253) is the portion
of3dsMaxthatcreatesandmanagesmaterials.
In the Material Editor , you can assign maps to a
material’s color components and to its numeric
components such as o pacity. Maps add images,
patterns, color adjustments, and other effects to
the visual properties of the material.
In the 3ds Max Material Editor, you assign a
map by clicking the map button for a component
color or other component. This displays the
Material/Map Browser, w hich lets you choose the
map t ype.
3ds Max provides several types of
maps (page
3–1062)
. The most basic is a 2D map, a
two-dimensional image that is typically mapped
onto the surface of geometric objects.
Otherusesof2Dmapsareasenvironmentsto
create a background for the scene, as projections
from lig hts, and as displacements to "embo ss"
geometry.
A Combustion map is a
2D map (page 2–1434) .
It is a Combustion project used by the 3ds Max
Material Editor, so like any Combustion project,
it is vector-based, animatable, and ful ly editable.
From within the Material Editor, you can have
Combustion create a new projec t from scratch, or
use an existing composite or Paint branch. You
can synchronize the Combustion Timeline with
the3dsMaxtimeslidersoanimatedmaterials
synchronize with your 3D scene.
WithaCombustionmap,youcanpaintineither
program: that is, you can paint either in the
Combustion viewport or on 3ds Max objects.
Both programs update the paint display. You also
have the option of using Combustion to paint on
an "unw r apped" projection of 3ds Max object
geometry.