MaxMatter gives artists two new procedural mapping types and one utility: Bricklayer does what its name suggests; producing a completely tileable brick pattern for creating everything from rough cinderblock walls to finely polished ceramic tiles. In addition, it has a unique feature that allows the user to define "missing" blocks, which makes it ideal for the creation of building lights, spaceship hull lighting, etc.

Type-Mapper solves the age-old problem of the creation and placement of text on your objects. Instead of having to use a 2D paint program to create text for your models, Type-Mapper allows the user to simply type in text in the Material Editor using any 3ds max supported font style. Once complete, the text is automatically assigned to your objects, and can be edited on the fly. Plus, since it operates the way most standard 3ds max maps do, it can be used in concert with other procedurals such as noise to create weathered, aged sign text and graffiti.

The utility plug-in that ships with MaxMatter, is a must have utility called Flatten. (This is not the Flatten Plug-in by Mankua which sells for $149.00.) This routine lets the artists simplify and compress complex multi-layer bitmap and procedural materials into single rendered bitmaps. One of the major advantages here is that the render overhead is reduced significantly since there are no longer any procedurals that need to be calculated once Flatten has done its job, only bitmaps.


Features:

Procedural map for brick.
Text editor in the form of a procedural material.