Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
This setting handles materials that glow or cast light on their surroundings. This self-illumination can simply
allow materials to appear when no light is cast on them. When Global Illumination is enabled (which is
covered in Chapter 4, “Lighting”), surfaces with Luminous Intensity added will actually light up nearby ob-
jects. This will allow for very advanced and realistic lighting. The value entered here is the same as values
given to lights. A color can be set to tint the effect.
Ray Tracing
Light in a 3D scene can be bounced a certain number of times before stopping and resulting in black pixels.
Modo defaults to eight bounces for reflection and eight for refraction (transparency). When that limit is
reached, the light ray will not be calculated any further. Although this limit is often plenty, at times more
depth is needed (especially with transparency). Because black portions of a transparent object can be a prob-
lem and turning up the number of bounces can result in increased render times, the Exit Color field can be
used to cheat the effect of more ray bounces. The default setting of black will essentially do nothing, but
setting a color here will make semitransparent areas that are tinted with the Exit Color. This is a simple
workaround that can increase the quality and visual appeal of transparent materials without adding gratuit-
ous amounts of time to the final render.
Using Texture Layers
By adjusting the various controls on a basic material, some excellent materials can be created. However,
only so much can be done by using blanket, uniform adjustments to material settings. In many cases, values
need to modulate across the surface of a 3D model. To increase the possibilities of textures, additional layers
need to be added. Layers can be placed in the Shader Tree (see
Figure 3-10
). The Shader Tree is divided into
four sections: Render, Environment, Lights, and Cameras.
Figure 3-10:
The Shader Tree
