Hey guys I modeled an eyeball and I’m trying to learn more about materials and shaders etc...so I have this eyeball and I have a material I would like to apply to it. I can’t get it to map correctly at all. If I just apply the material to the diffuse and try to adjust the parameters in uvw modifier it doesn’t come out right at all, and then the other day I just learned to Unwrap UV’s but I really didn’t think it was necessary to do that for an eye, plus it unwrapped in too many pieces so I cant just place my material on top and re apply the material in max. If anyone can help me that would be great. thanks.

Intel Core i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz
Windows Ultimate 64 bit
ATI Radeon 5900 Series
3DS Max 2011

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eye02.max.zip

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If you need an anatomically right eyeball, you have to unwrap the geometry using the pelt method and create the image map in a paint program using the rendered template as a guide. Find tutorials on that topic (Pelt mapping).
Otherwise you could “project” the image at the right place using a simple UVW map modifier. Adjust the gizmo using the “plane” mode, this is usually enough if only the front part of the eye is to be seen.

ivan

As Ivan mentioned pelt mapping is probably the most accurate way to do this; but since this is a pretty fundamental skill I thought I’d run through the simpler of Ivan’s options to see how it would turn out with basic UV mapping.

I’m still learning this myself, so get your grains of salt ready.  I always apply my material to the object first and then go straight to adding a UVW map modifier.  With the modifier in place I experiment with different options, but usually planar or box get pretty close.  Don’t forget to try unchecking “use real world scale” and select the gizmo submenu under the modifier to experiment with moving things around.  Furthermore the fit and bitmap fit buttons near the bottom of the modifier menu seem to often save tweaking time.  If necessary I add an unwrap UVW modifier to fine tune the UV’s.  When everything is looking good I collapse the stack to lock the modifiers in.

As far as those crazy seams - you can’t define them with the unwrap UVW as you can with pelt mapping; but you can add your UVW Map, and UVW unwrap modifiers to subselections and thereby (with a little practice) control the seam placement.

Max 2012 Design
Win7 Ultimate 64, 12GB DDR3
Core i7-970 3.2GHz
PNY Quadro 4000
Long Trail Blackberry Wheat

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Thanks a lot guys, It seems I’ll have to look into pelt mapping. As for the UVW modifier I think I couldn’t get it to work because I was using spherical and I had real world mapping checked for some reason. I’ll try and get a shot at pelt mapping and see what happens. If I run into any more problems I’ll continue to post my questions here. Anyways thanks again guys I appreciate it.

Intel Core i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz
Windows Ultimate 64 bit
ATI Radeon 5900 Series
3DS Max 2011