[Figure 8-8] Pop-up color palette

CREATE SIMPLE MATERIALS
The Simple Material panel of the Shader Window only includes six simple material properties, but you can create an amazing variety of materials from these simple properties.

Changing Color
Directly underneath the Diffuse Color, Highlight, Ambient, and Reflection material property titles in the Simple Material panel is a color swatch that sets the color for the respective property. You can change the current color by clicking this color swatch and selecting a new color from the pop-up color palette, shown in Figure 8-8. To open the standard color selector dialog box, click the icon in the upper-right corner of the pop-up color palette.

If you simply need to change the color of a material group, a quicker way to do this is with the Color Tool found in the Editing Tools.

[Figure 8-9] Texture Manager dialog box

Adding Texture Maps
The open space underneath the color swatches is to hold a texture map that is loaded from the hard disk. To load a texture map, simply click the open space and the Texture Manager dialog box, shown in Figure 8-9, opens. This dialog box includes a preview of the selected image, a drop-down list containing recently loaded images, and a Browse button where you can locate new images to load. Once a texture map is loaded, you can change its brightness using the Map Strength dial. Each property that can use a texture map has a Map Strength parameter dial. This value sets how strong the texture map is. For example, a Map Strength value of 100 will cause the full texture map to be used and a Map Strength value of 0 will turn off the texture map.

[Figure 8-10] Material with highlights

Adding Highlights
Highlights are surface areas where the reflected light is most intense. The color brightness determines the intensity of the highlights and you can also set the size of the highlights using the Highlight Size dial. Smooth shiny surfaces will have smaller, brighter highlights and rougher surfaces will have larger, fuzzier highlights because the reflected light is scattered more. If the Apply Texture to Highlight option is enabled for the Diffuse Color property, the texture map for the Diffuse Color is copied to the Highlight property and only the bright areas of the texture image receive the highlights. Figure 8-10 shows a material with a highlight.

For realistic scenes, make sure the highlight color is the same as the main light color.

Using Diffuse and Ambient Colors
The Diffuse Color property sets the surface color of the material and the Ambient property sets the color of the indirect light in the scene. These two colors are combined when used together. For example, a material with a red Diffuse Color and a blue Ambient color would appear purple.

The Diffuse Color will tint any texture map that is applied to the Diffuse Color property. To avoid tinting the texture map, set the Diffuse Color to white.