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Chapter 16: Creating and Applying Standard Materials

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using standard materials

Learning the various shaders

Exploring the Material rollouts

Applying materials to scene objects

Now that you've learned the basic material properties and acquainted yourself with the Material Editor and the Material/Map Browser, this chapter gives you a chance to create some simple original materials and apply them to objects in the scene. The simplest material is based on the Standard material type, which is the default material type.

Using the Standard Material

Standard materials are the default Max material type. They provide a single, uniform color determined by the Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, and Filter color swatches. Standard materials can use any one of several different shaders. Shaders are algorithms used to compute how the material should look, given its parameters.

Standard materials have parameters for controlling highlights, opacity, and self-illumination. They also include many other parameters sprinkled throughout many different rollouts. With all the various rollouts, even a standard material has an infinite number of possibilities.

Using Shading Types

Max includes several different shader types. These shaders are all available in a drop-down list in the Shader Basic Parameters rollout at the top of the Parameter Editor panel in the Slate Material Editor. The Slate Material Editor is opened using the Rendering⇒Material Editor⇒Slate Material Editor menu command or by pressing the M key. Each shader type displays different options in its respective Basic Parameters rollout. Figure 16.1 shows the basic parameters for the Blinn shader. Other available shaders include Anisotropic, Metal, Multi-Layer, Oren-Nayar-Blinn, Phong, Strauss, and Translucent Shader.

Cross-Reference

The Material/Map Browser holds all the various material types. The other material types are covered in Chapter 18, “Creating Compound Materials and Using Material Modifiers,” and Chapter 30, “Using Specialized Material Types.” •

The Shader Basic Parameters rollout also includes several options for shading the material, including Wire, 2-Sided, Face Map, and Faceted, as shown in Figure 16.1. Wire mode causes the model to appear as a wireframe model. The 2-Sided option makes the material appear on both sides of the face and is typically used in conjunction with the Wire option or with transparent materials. The Face Map mode applies maps to each single face on the object. Faceted ignores the smoothing between faces.

Note

Using the Wire option or the 2-Sided option is different from the wireframe display option in the viewports. The Wire and 2-Sided options define how the object looks when rendered. •

FIGURE 16.1

Basic parameter options include (from left to right) Wire, 2-Sided, Face Map, and Faceted.

Blinn shader

This shader is the default. It renders simple circular highlights and smoothes adjacent faces.

The Blinn shader includes color swatches for setting Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, and Self-Illumination colors. To change the color, click the color swatch and select a new color in the Color Selector dialog box.

Note

You can drag colors among the various color swatches. When you do so, the Copy or Swap Colors dialog box appears, which enables you to copy or swap the colors. •

You can use the Lock buttons to the left of the color swatches to lock the colors together so that both colors are identical and a change to one automatically changes the other. You can lock Ambient to Diffuse and Diffuse to Specular.

The small, square buttons to the right of the Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, Self-Illumination, Opacity, Specular Level, and Glossiness controls are shortcut buttons for adding a map in place of the respective parameter. Clicking these buttons opens the Material/Map Browser, where you can select the map type. You can also lock the Ambient and Diffuse maps together with the lock icon to the right of the map buttons. The Ambient and Diffuse colors are locked together by default.

When a map is loaded