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Materials


Materials can be thought of as colors, and plain color is actually the simplest form of a mate rial. A complete material is displayed by superimposing on a color additional types of attributes which control how a surface interacts with lights and  the environment.

Index
 

     Editing the parameters of a material

     Color Shaders

     Reflection / transmission Shaders

     Transparency Shaders

     Bump / Displacement Shaders

Overview
 

 

More about shaders

Shaders are either procedural or precaptured texture maps. Procedural shaders generate a pattern by executing a procedure or program. In other words, these effects are generated from scratch and do not use a prestored image. In contrast, the precaptured texture maps use an  image file which is mapped onto a surface, either for painting the image on the surface, or for using the image as a transparency filter or as a bump map.

 

> See examples Examples of shader settings


The texture maps can be captured photographically, can be previously rendered images, or can be images created in a paint program. More...