Create a Microscopic Material & Organism

This tutorial assumes you understand the basics of 3DS Max. I'll try to go into detail as possible, but you should know the fundamentals to understand some of the topics described herein.

Our goals: create a microscopic material, create a "spore" model and render an interesting scene.

Special tools/plugins: None needed, however, this tutorial is tuned specifically to 3DS Max 6. Though there are workarounds to accomplish much of the same procedures with earlier versions, I wont be going into those. Do yourself a favor and upgrade if you haven't already!

We'll begin by modeling our microscopic spore. First, begin by creating a geosphere in any viewport. Use the settings as shown on the left.

You'll also notice on the far left illustration, that I've placed a camera in the scene. I've aligned the camera to my final or key view. By doing this I'll be able to switch back to the key view simply by pressing 'c'. This is much easier than having to readjust the Perspective or User view constantly.

Next, convert the geosphere to an editable poly. Go to polygon sub-object mode and select all the polys of the Geosphere. Bring up the Bevel menu and set the bevel height to 35.0 and the outline amount to -5.5. Ensure you have By Polygon checked and click OK.

The polys you selected initally should still be selected. Bring up the Inset menu and inset an amount of 3.5, insetting by group or polygon wont matter at this point.

Next, bring up the Extrude menu. Extrude your still selected polygons by the value of -20, again, operation type doesn't matter.

Now, bring up the Bevel menu again and bevel to a height of 60.0 and an outline amount of -6.5, click ok. Finally, add a Mesh Smooth modifier with 2 iterations. Your result should, more or less, match the image on the left.

That concludes the modeling, now onto the material. I've run across a number of variations to this type of material. I've found this one, so far, to be super tweakable and probably the most straight forward to put together. I would consider this a starting point, and as your scene demands, tweak the hell out of it.

Begin with an Oren-Nayar-Blinn base shader. Ensure Self-Illumination is checked. Click on the channel swatch next to Self-Illumination and insert a Falloff map. The falloff type should be Perpendicular/Parallel. In the white channel of this falloff map, insert yet another falloff map, set the type to Shadow/Light and adjust the black color to a medium grey. I used RGB 130,130,130.

Move back to the top of the material chain, set the Ambient and Diffuse colors to black and insert a Smoke map in the Bump channel.

Set the Smoke as follows: Size=8, Iterations=15, Exponent=1.2

Render and enjoy.

Tips: Multiple organisims of differing shapes and sizes and heavy use of depth of field will lend to more interesting renders.