3ds Max® 2009 Bible

Chapter 15. Creating and Applying Standard Materials

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using standard materials

• Learning the various shaders

• Exploring the Material rollouts

Now that you've learned the basic material properties and acquainted yourself with the Material Editor, 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.

Note

Clicking the Standard button lets you select a different material type from the Material/Map Browser. These material types are covered in Chapter 16, "Creating Compound Materials and Using Material Modifiers."

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. Each shader type displays different options in ...