Logo or decal on procedural material?

[andyH]

Hi everyone, I was wondering if someone would be able to give me a quick overview of the process best used to place a decal upon a arch/vis material.

 

I am modelling a piano, and I want to place the Steinway & Sons logo on the open keyboard lid, but I am having some problems.

 

I have so far managed to apply a logo from a bitmap image to a polygon with a UVWmap modifier so that the logo could be scaled and adjusted, and although the logo has a black background (as does the underlying material), I cant get the same surface effect as the base material. In that the base material is the arch/viz plastic preset, but even applying specualr and glossy setttings to the decal in the multi-sub objoect level I cant get it to match.

 

My guess is that with some photoshop trickery it may be possible to create an image of just the lettering and logo (based on the downloaded gif file) and apply that as a diffuse and possibly bump map to the object, so that the underlying shiney plastic material is not affected, and the logo sits nicely as if it had been painted or engraved on the surface??

 

So, I need a black and very polished plastic part to have some nice gold lettering on it that is derived from a downloaded image of the font and decal... (see link)

 

http://www.classics.umusic.com/steinway/flash/Steinway_Logo_v2.gif

 

any hints would be much appreciated.

 

I am using max 2010.

[Dave Buchhofer]

quickest and easiest is to just "place" it over the original material with some opacity Thats not always good enough quality wise however.

 

another option, you can do a MIX map, where the decal is map channel 2, with its own corresponding uvw modifier, and the base material is on map channel 1.

 

Either should work fine, the problems start to occur when you're trying to do this over top of a displacement map~

[andyH]

Thanks for the reply dave, I tried messing with the opacity of the map but of course it washed out the decals and resulted in lower quality than I could accept.

 

I havent used MIX maps before, but it looks like a good option. I will give it a try.