Great. Now you know how to get to the Material Editor, but you still don't really know how to use it. The best way is to start trying it on an object. Start by making an object, in this case, let's try making a simple sphere.

Once you've got your sphere made, open up your Material Editor in any of the ways described above.

Download the image bitmap. Open it up and save it to your computer so you can use it in your 3D Max scene. (opens in new window)

Select your first material and go down to section 8 - click the Maps rollout. Generally, if we're just adding a texture we add a bitmap to the Diffuse Color. Go ahead and click the Diffuse Color button, then select bitmap from the top of the list, then select the image you downloaded.

Right away you will notice your Material Editor window will change a bit and that the little sphere in the editor has got the stretched bitmap over it.

Why did the editor window go to a new area...?
What happened was when you clicked Diffuse Color and selected a bitmap, Max ADDED that map onto the material. So now you're looking at the control panel for the Diffused Color map...

This is where it can start to get tricky, because you can have several maps added to a material, and even more tricky, you can have more maps added to a map that's added to a material. Try to think of it like a folder tree in windows. Everything branches down. This is how texture artists can make one texture of, say a brick wall, and then add a texture of spry paint over it.

So now you're looking at the controls for Diffuse Color. All you need to do is set the tiling for the texture to two. This tells Max to repeat the texture twice horizontally.

Take a moment to play around with the different tiling options and angles, but leave everything at default except for tiling set to 2 when you are done.

So now you're thinking: "How do I get the texture on this meaningless little ball onto my actual object?" All you have to do is either click and drag the little ball onto your object in the viewport, or you can click the object in the viewport and then click the "Assign Material to Selection" button.

Awesome! The texture is now applied to your object... But now you're wondering: "Why can't I see the texture on the object?"

Go ahead and click the "Show Map in Viewport" - This let's you see an object with that material applied to it visible in the viewport.

You should now see something like this in your perspective viewport!

Let's move on to the next and final echelon of basic texture mapping...

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