Materials and Surface Shaders

Every object in a scene has a material that defines how it looks in the rendered image. Each material provides connection points — or ports — for all of the object’s attributes. By attaching shaders to these ports, you define the object’s surface.

This section explains how to create and assign materials to objects in your scene, as well as how to manage materials using material libraries.

It also describes how to work with surface shaders, which are frequently used to define an object’s basic surface shading characteristics (diffuse lighting, ambience, transparency, reflectivity, and so on).

About Materials

The Material Manager

Creating and Assigning Materials

Editing Materials

Deleting Materials

Managing Material Libraries

About Surface Shaders

Editing Surface Shader Properties

Shading Models

Reflectivity, Transparency, and Refraction

Using the soft_material Shader

Surface Shader Optimizations

Viewing Materials in the Explorer



Autodesk Softimage v.7.5