Material Editor

The Material Editor allows us to create a Material that gives a Mesh a specific visual appearance when it comes into contact with Light in a Scene. The Material files have .incmat as their filename extension.

To open the Material Editor, double-click on a Material file in the Asset Manager or right-click on the Menu bar and click on Material Editor from the drop-down list. The latter option can be seen in the illustration below:

The sections defined in the Material Editor are discussed below. They will not be displayed in the Material Editor if a Material file has already been opened.

The Used Materials section has Materials that have been previously applied to a Mesh in a Scene. These Materials can be edited by clicking on them.

New Material, as its name suggests, allows us to create new Materials. The illustration below depicts its behavior when clicked.

Open Material opens a window that allows us to select an existing Material file. An example of the window is shown below:

Once a Material has been opened, the Material Editor allows the user to edit the Material's Attributes.

There are several Shading Models available to choose from when creating a new Material. The following sections give a brief description of each and list their available Attributes:

• Car Paint Model

• Custom Shading Model

• Phong Model

• Glass Model

• Extended PBR Model

• PBR Model

• Shadeless Model

In each of these Models, it is possible to hover over each Attribute with the cursor and see their property names. Below, one can see the property name diffuse_color for the Color Attribute of a Phong Model.

These can then be copied and pasted by right-clicking on them, selecting either property Name or Value, and pasting where needed. This is particularly useful for accessing the names for the Set Material Property and Get Material Property Nodes.

See Also

• Mesh

External Links

• More on Normal Mapping on Wikipedia.

• More on Environment Mapping on Wikipedia.

• More on Specular Reflection on Wikipedia.

• More on Diffuse Reflection on Wikipedia.

• More on Fresnel Shading on Kyle Halladay's blog.

• More on Albedo Shading on Scratchapixel.