Another Max 3.0 image, this is a quickly, taking about 3 days to make. The geometry is totally simple, some cylinders, spheres, lofts and meshsmoothed boxes. The complexity comes from the textures and atmosphere.

The textures use just about every single old and new material and shader type available: Blinn, Metal, Anisotropic, Multi Layer, Oren-Nayar-Blinn, and Raytraced materials with the new falloff material to place a different map towards the edges of the objects. These textures are very deep with many, many layers of texture maps and noise. For example, the center pod uses displacement mapping on a nurbs sphere with the cellular texture, followed by several maps, a falloff material in both the diffuse and reflection channels, bump maps, specular level and glossiness maps, anyways, you get the idea. I really like the achieved effect.

The atmosphere is a set of three effects channels. An effects channel is a new thing in max3.0, it lets you place filters on top of your image like you used to do in videopost, but now you can do it directly at the scene level. This includes first a motion blur effect, followed by a color tinting effect (to make the image redder) followed by a diffuse glow affecting the brighter parts of the image, which makes the image look a little softer.

So, there you have it. Maybe it should be called "Neil Having Fun With Slimy Materials".