Hi Elanza. I´ll try to help.

1. If you open the material editor in max by pressing the "m" pick a new material
and scroll down to the maps rollout. in the diffuse colour slot click and scroll to the "bitmap" option at the top of the list of available maps. Load your carbon fiber .jpg
for simplicity just drag the same map to the bump slot and maybe turn up the specular level slightly. and try using something like oren nayer blinn as the shader type. I'll upload a screen shot. thats a very simple material that should do the trick.

2. You can load a picture into the view port background for reference by pressing alt+b and loading a file. or you can load it into a material through the material editor as described above.

3. Flames can be tricky, one way would be to find a video of flames and map it onto a plane in max. Does anyone else have any good ideas??

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Than you so mush Tyson it means a lot.

Lol I was in tears because I struggling so mush.

I’ll go and try that.

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hi elanza you r new like me
how r u

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i'm fine now but was very irritated with myself today.

lol how you doing with the program bluerabbit?

tyson thanks again i got it so i'm working away.

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No worries. heres a link to a fire loop avi file. It loops Ok but not perfectly.

Load this into a material's diffuse slot and apply to a plane. copy the video to the self illumination slot and possibly the opacity slot

( I had to push the contrast of the fire video for the opacity slot otherwise it becomes too dim. You can do this in max using the map's output. Click the fire loop map in the opacity slot and find the output rollout, increasing RGB level and lowering RGB offset will increase the contrast. I upped the RGB level to 3.0 and lowered RGB offset to -0.1

for brighter fire check the "colour" check box for self illumination. Make sure theres no specular level either. You could create an omni light and animate it flickering from orange to red to black etc.. and place it near the fire plane so the fire interacts with the surrounding geometry.

Also. right click the fire plane and uncheck "cast shadows" and "receive shadows"
and you may want to turn on far attenuation for the omni light so it only reaches a short distance and fades out. I've also used inverse square decay which is a more realistic type of falloff for lights. when this is on you need to increase the light multiplier. I'll upload some images to show you what I mean.

[Link to rapidshare.com]

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