Autodesk 12812-051462-9011 User Guide 3 - Page 557

In addition, with Combustion you can import 3ds Max scenes that have been rendered to a rich pixel file on page 7366 (RPF on page 7366 or RLA on page 7364 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 Because 3ds Max runs only on Windows, you cannot use Combustion to create material maps on a Macintosh. 3ds Max Materials and the Combustion Map In 3ds Max, a material on page 8041 is data that you assign to the surface or faces of an object so that it appears a certain way when rendered. Materials affect the color of objects, their shininess, their opacity, and so on. The Material Editor on page 5284 is the portion of 3ds Max that creates and manages materials. In the Material Editor, you can assign maps to a material's color components and to its numeric components such as opacity. 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, which lets you choose the map type. 3ds Max provides several types of maps on page 8036. The most basic is a 2D map, a two-dimensional image that is typically mapped onto the surface of geometric objects. Other uses of 2D maps are as environments to create a background for the scene, as projections from lights, and as displacements to "emboss" geometry. A Combustion map is a 2D map on page 5782. It is a Combustion project used by the 3ds Max Material Editor, so like any Combustion project, it is vector-based, animatable, and fully editable. From within the Material Editor, you can have Combustion create a new project from scratch, or use an existing composite or Paint branch. You can synchronize the Combustion Timeline with the 3ds Max time slider so animated materials synchronize with your 3D scene. With a Combustion map, you can paint in either 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 "unwrapped" projection of 3ds Max object geometry. 5812 | Chapter 19 Material Editor, Materials, and Maps