you want me to explain for the shieds? be warned its kindda complicated...
bah, I'll try a small tut for that anyway.
"opens max"
I'll do for a still, will be a bit simpler. if someone wants a tut for an animation, just ask, but it's more complicated and, mostly, much longer.
1) first, you need a shield map. extract the frame you want from the shield ani ( with aniview ). it should be greyscale if I remember right, that's good, you will be able to use it as an opacity map as well.
2) make sure you have the shield mesh. for a render, a low poly mesh for that WILL suck, so select the shield mesh, modifier tab, apply a meshsmooth. give it as many iterations as you want, 2 should be enough tho.
3) open the material editor ( shortcut: "m" ). drop "glossiness and "soften" to 0. increase "self-illumniation" to 100.
3) assign the shield map to opacity ( click on the gery square next to the entries, choose bitmap, browse for the map ).
4)to make things simpler, open the frame in your paint prog and colorize it there ( you could do that in max w/o modifying the map, but that'll save some hassle for me
). assign this new map to diffuse.
5)in the material editor, open the map rollout menu, click on the "diffuse color" entry ( a long grey bar with an entry that should look like "Map #xx (xxxxxx.xxx)"
6) in the "coordinates" part: uncheck the two "tile" boxes. change the map channel to 10 ( no special reason, I just find it convenient, you can avoid mistakes that way, you know shield maps channels will be 10, so no error that way ).
do the same wth the opacity entry.
7) apply the map to the shield mesh ( in the material editor, click on the icon like a blue/white checked box, that will make the map show in the viewports ). close the material editor.
8)that's not necessary, for for you it'll be simple, so: right click on the shield mesh, then "convert to", "convert to editable mesh". That will collpase the stack ( you can also rightclick a stack entry and select "collapse all".
click on the red square in the modifier panel ( or rightclick on the mesh, "sub-objects", "polygons" ). select the polygons on the side where you want the shield impact to appear ( no need to be precise, it's just to avoid the shield impact to appear on the two sides of the shield mesh. you can select half the polys of the mesh if you want ). don't go out of the sub-objects mode.
modifier->UVW mapping
9) ok, to set it up:
first, set "map channel" to 10 ( remember the channel you chose for the diffuse and opacity maps? )
now, click on the "UVW mapping" modifier in the stack ( it should turn yellow ). this will allow you to modify the UV mapping gizmo.
damn, max crashed
( guess I had too many progs running at the same time
)
10) ok, from memory.
move/scale the gizmo so the shield impact map shows about where you want it. don't rotate it tho, just move/scale for now.
switch to rotate now, but don't rotate the gizmo yet.
on the top bar, you should see a rollout menu with "view" entry selected. switch to "local". this will allow you to rotate the gizmo around its own axis, and not the view axis. now you can rotate the gizmo, it's easier that way. move, scale, rotate as much as you want so it's how you want it to be.
Voila, that should be it
additional:
11) if you want multiple shield impacts on the same mesh.
create another new map the same way as above. ( use another frame of the shield ani so it looks better ). give both opacity and dffuse maps another map channel ( 11 for exemple ).
12) do the same things as above etc. when you apply a new "UVW mapping" modifier, give it a map channel of 11.
13) for even more shield impacts, do the exact same as above, just increment the map channels, etc.
