Tutorial
Sunset
In this tutorial you will learn how to create sunset animation using 3dsmax sun slowly going down below horizon. Although this is just a simple animation, you will learn a lot from this tutorial. In first section of this tutorial, you are going to create ocean wave using animated material. You can apply this technique to any water surface, like river, pond, or lake.
1. At first, you need sea object. You can use a simple plane. Open or reset 3dsmax. Go to Create tab. Click Plane button. Click and drag to create a plane in Top viewport. While plane still selected, go to Modify tab. Use 500×500 for plane size.
2. Go to Camera tab. Click Free button. Then, click in Front viewport to create Free Camera. Change Perspective viewport into Camera (first activate viewport by right click in this viewport, and press “C” in keyboard). Move and rotate camera, so you have camera view like video tutorial.
3. Next, you will create material for sea object. Open Material Editor (press “M” in keyboard). By default one of material slot is active. Change this material name to “sea”. Apply this material to plane by dragging from material slot to plane in viewport. Change Diffuse color to blue (R=50, G=50, B=104). Also increase Specular value to 50 to make sea surface more shiny.
4. Scroll down until you see Maps rollout. Open Maps rollout. Increase Bump value to 100. Click button right next to Bump. In Material/Map Browser window, double click Noise. In Noise Parameters rollout, activate Fractal with Size=5. You can try a test render (F9) to see the result. Note: Bump is used to simulate material “roughness”.
5. Right now, you had static ocean waves. To create wave animation, you need to animate material. Click Auto Key button. Move slider to frame 100, and enter Phase=3. When finished, turn off Auto Key. Using Phase, you can animate noise to simulate wave movement.
6. You can try to render the animation if you want. Press F10 to open Render window. In Time Output activate Active Time Segment. And in Render Output you can choose filename, folder and animation format AVI, MOV. And click Render.
