Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Tip: Enlarge your material view
If you double-click on the material you want a better view
of, Max will open a new little preview window. This new
window is adjustable. Just grab either bottom corner and
drag it up or down in size. The larger you drag this
window, however, the longer it will take to refresh your
material updates. Likewise, you can right-click a shader
and adjust your viewing size.
Note:
Throughout your experience with modeling you may hear
people refer to materials as shaders. Even 3ds Max does
this. A material in 3ds Max uses a shader to make up part
of its effect. A shader is a collection of instructions to tell
the hardware how you want to render an object.
Material Terminology
To fully understand materials, you need to have some basic
knowledge of the terminology. Here's a list of important
terms:
2-Sided — Makes the object render both the front and back
of a polygon.
Bump — Using a grayscale height map, bump makes the
surface appear to have nicks, scratches, or dents.
Diffuse — The base color of the object. Think of diffuse tex-
ture as the base, or what it would look like if it were fully
lit from all angles.
Displacement — Using a grayscale height map, displacement
actually adds geometry to deform the surface of your
model.
Faceted — Makes the material ignore its smoothing and draw
every polygon as flat.
