Hello, today I'm going to show you how to make your elemental staff look like it has a real crystal orb.

First of all use Model Viewer and pick a dark staff as your weapon.
It dose not matter what the character is as this will be deleted in 3D Studio Max 2010.
Also the elemental staff, dose not matter which one, but the dark staff is easer to see the orb and edit.
Now set it as MQO and name it something like staff.

Now open up Metaseq.
And load up the save mqo file
Now zoom in to the staff and start using the del button to cut the orb out.

After doing it look around to make sure that the orb is fully cut out with out cutting any of the gold part out.

There will look a bit weird when looking at it from an angle, but that's ok as this will not show when we come to work on it in 3D Studio Max 2010.
Save it and then load this in to 3D Studio Max 2010.

In 3D Studio Max 2010 go to import and import the MQO file.
Now select the characters mesh, be careful not to select the staff mesh.
And then hit Edit and Delete.
This will delete the character only leaving the staff mesh in place.

Now open up material editor and click on the standard button and pick Architectural.

On the User Defined click on it for it to drop down and pick, Wood Varnished.
Click on the None on the Diffuse Map and then click on bitmap and find your staff texture map.
Now where it says Map~19 or something like it click on it and go back to 01- Default.

On the Diffuse Color hit the refresh icon next to it.
This will pop up with the color of the staff.
Now this will give the staff a nice glossy wood texture finish.

Now high light your staff mesh and then click on the assign Material to selection button.

Now if we render this we should get a glossy wood looking feel to the staff.

Now for the fun part.
On the fight click on the GeoSphere button.

Now pick the radius of the Spear to 65 and the Segment to 4 and geodesic base type to Octa and turn of smoothing.
Set this from the left point view and start of in the center of the hollow part where the orb use to be till the Radius is 65.
You can change the setting of the orb by highlighting it and going to modify.

If we render this, it will look this this.
Not quite looking like a crystal yet.

Now open up the material editor again and pick a new sphere.
Click on standard and Architectural again.
On the user defined click on it for it to drop down and pick Glass Clear.
On the Diffuse Color pick white.
Red 255, Green 255, Blue 255.
Now on the Transparency set it from 100 to 80.
Now assign that to the orb.

Now set up a plane add a Matter/Shadow to the plane and place the staff on the plane.
Add some lightning and you can get it looking like this.

Not sure how to add a plane or matter/shadow check here to see this tutorial and it will show you how.
Play around with it and you can create some wonderful effects.

You can download the Tutorial file here