No Surface Material Type

The following are the steps required to remove the 'No Surface Material Type' thing that pops up whenever you walk on or shoot a surface in Crysis. It is a hack solution, and there is a legitimate way of removing it, but if you have a lot of textures, it takes a lot of time.

The legitimate way:
assign a 'Surface Type' in the properties of the Crysis material.
Now instead of getting the message popping up, the material will react according to it's surface type. Concrete, for example, will appear to chip and crack when you shoot it.

The hack way:
Copy the .dds texture file from here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3ClvuCv6FZsMjFaQ2JXV0k4YkU
Paste it into Game>Textures folder, don't rename it
If you don't have a Textures folder in your Game folder, create one
Done

This is overwritting the texture used for the 'No Surface Material Type' message with an invisible texture. It is still popping up, you just can't see it, and if you want the material to react to being shot you will still need to assign a surface type in the material properties.

This video shows how to make an animated texture - similar to the one demonstrated in my lecture. This one is a shrinking crack. Ideally it would be a growing crack, I just didn't change the names of the textures around.

Alternatively, if you couldn't be bothered watching a 5 minute video, to achieve an animated texture do the following:

Create a series of CryTiffs with the same name with a number that increase by 1 ie Texture01, Texture02, Texture03

Have them all located in the same folder - ideally within Game>Textures

Copy one of these CryTiff and rename it something similar to this
Texture##01_03(0.5)
Where Texture is the common name you used
## is the number of digits ie a sequence to 100 would be 001, 002, ..., 099, 100 so would have 3 hashes
01_03 is the range of textures you want to sequence through in the animation
(0.5) is the amount of time in seconds you wish to stay on each texture during the animation

Assign the Texture##01_03(0.5) or similar as to the diffuse slot of the material within CryEngine

The video tutorial goes into more detail if in doubt. It also briefly covers how to create a material from scratch within CryEngine to assign to an object. Useful if you are still getting the Replace Me texture on imported objects - but it's much better to fix that problem within Max - use as a last resort

Simple Glass Settings

This image shows some basic glass setting and some textures to use to get a reasonable distortion effect. The textures to the right are the specular and environment maps, they are custom textures so you wont find them in your files but similar textures would be quite easy to make. The diffuse texture is just plain white plain white. The plastic bump map is a standard texture and is scaled to produce a warped reflection. A better environment map will give the glass reflections from the scene but the above settings should serve as a starting point to experiment further.