Greeble 1.5 for 3ds max 4 and 3ds max 5
Written by Tom Hudson, 3D Studio/DOS and MAX co-developer
Copyright 2001 Tom Hudson

Tom Hudson's Greeble plug-in first appeared in Jon A. Bell's 1998 book "3D Studio MAX R2.5 f/x and design," from Coriolis Press. (A version for 3ds max 3 appeared in an updated version of this book.) Greeble is an object modifier that builds industrial detail consisting of beveled plates with additional "widget" details on top. These parametric building blocks are excellent for creating quick details to dress up either objects or selected faces in your scene. Properly used, Greeble can give the illusion of complex city landscapes (such as the industrial wasteland seen at the beginning of "Bladerunner") or spacecraft details similar to vehicles you may have seen in the "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" films and TV series.

Installation

1. Make sure you don't have a 3ds max 4 session currently active. If you do, the plug-in won't appear in the program until you quit or until you load a second session.
2. Copy the Greeble.dlm file into your 3ds max 4 \PLUG-INS folder.
3. When you re-start 3ds max 4, the Greeble plug-in will appear in the Modifier List, in the Modify tab of the Command panel.
4. If you do not have your Modifier Buttons displayed, you can display them by right-clicking on the Down arrow button to the right of Modifier List. Check Show Buttons, and then pick Configure Modifier Sets. You can then drag and drop the Greeble modifier on top of a little-used Modifier Button, if you want.
5. To test Greeble, create a simple box, then apply the Greeble modifier to it. You should see the Greeble "panels" and "widgets" appear on the box.
6. Delete the Greeble modifier, then apply an Edit Mesh modifier to the box.
7. Pick the Polygon icon (under the Selection area of the rollout), or open the checkbox next to Edit Mesh and pick Polygon from the Sub-object dropdown list. Click on the top polygon of the box to select it, but leave the other faces unselected.
8. Now, apply the Greeble modifier again.
9. Result: you'll see the effects of the Greeble modifier only on the selected face(s) of the box. Greeble also works on selected faces of collapsed Editable Mesh objects as well.

Note: Be careful when applying the Greeble modifier to extremely complex geometry, or large numbers of selected faces - the vastly increased amount of detail created by Greeble may tax your system resources, depending on the speed of your computer's CPU(s), your video display card, and/or the amount of RAM in your system. 

Greeble Controls

The following sections explain the controls for the Greeble plug-in.

Parameters

There are three controls under the Parameters section:

Generate From Quads/Triangles -- If these are checked and the source object has quadrilaterals, triangles or both defined, then they're modified.

Generate From Triangles -- If checked and the source object has triangular faces defined, then they are modified.

Seed -- Specifies the initial random number generator value. Change to get different details.

Panels

Generate -- If checked, generates extruded panels from the source geometry. If unchecked, no panels will be extruded.

Min. Height and Max. Height (animatable) -- Specifies the height range of the panels in units.

Taper (animatable) -- Controls the amount of beveling on the panels, shown as a percent value. Tapering 100 percent will make little pyramids. A taper of 0 will make simple extruded blocks.

Materials -- A list of comma-separated numbers indicating which sub-object material IDs to use for panel generation. The values entered are used at random when generating the panels, and at least one number should be entered.

For example, if the field contains only one number (for example 1), only sub-object material ID 1 will be used for the panels. If the field contains two numbers (for example, 1,2), then the Greeble plug-in will generate panels randomly that use sub-object material numbers 1 and 2, in approximately equal numbers. By using the same number more than once in the material list, you can make a certain sub-object material appear more often. For example, entering "1,1,1,2" will create panels that are Material 1 approximately 75 percent of the time and Material 2 approximately 25 percent of the time.

Keep Original Geometry -- If checked, the faces that the panels were generated from will remain. (This is wasteful, but it may come in handy if you collapse the stack, and need to extract the original geometry as an element.) Normally this is unchecked, which means the original triangular or quadrilateral geometry is removed when the panels are generated.

Select Tops and Sides - If checked, these features enable you to select either the tops or sides of the beveled Panel faces for secondary Greeble application. To see how this works, apply a Greeble modifier to your object (or selected sub-object faces) and check Select Sides. Then, apply a second Greeble modifier on top of the first one. You'll see that the beveled side faces of the original "Greebled" object get an additional set of "Greebled" faces. (Note that you may have to adjust the Panel and Widget heights so that this new geometry doesn't poke through the first Greeble-modified faces.)

Widgets

These are the detail bits (you might call them "sub-greebles") that are created on top of the panels. If panels are turned off, the widgets are generated on the original geometry. The controls under Widgets are:

Generate -- If checked, generates widgets.

Widget Type icons - These specify the type of widgets that are created. By checking or unchecking them as needed, you can customize the types of details on your objects.

Min. Size and Max. Size -- Specifies the size of the widgets, shown as a percentage of the panel size.

Max. Height -- Specifies the maximum height of the widgets in world units. The widget generator bases the widget height on its size. The longer or wider a widget is, the shorter it is and vice versa.

Density -- Specifies the number of widgets to generate on each panel or source face.

Materials -- The same as the Materials control under Panels.

Performance

The Modify For Render Only checkbox enables you to increase the Density setting of your final Greeble Widget details at render time only. Checking it before you increase the Density setting will speed up your viewport redrawing time.

Texture Mapping

The Greeble plug-in creates mapping coordinates for all generated elements automatically. If the sub-object materials assigned to the various generated panels or widgets use mapping, the proper mapping coordinates will appear on the modified object.
