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Introduction

The Material Editor (and the whole material system) is one of the most important elements of Maxwell Render™. It provides a powerful set of parameters for advanced editing of a Maxwell material.

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The five main areas of the material editor are:

1. Layers Tree

Maxwell Render’s materials are made up of different “components” which are organized into folders (Layers). Each Layer can hold one or more BSDF components (BSDF is the main material definition), plus one Coating (varnish), one Emitter and/or one Displacement component.

Each folder represents a Layer, which are stacked vertically one on top of the other, similar to layers in a 2D image editing application. Please see the Stacking Layers section for more information about this. 

  

The Layers tree

2. Material Preview

This window allows you to get a quick preview of the material while you are editing it. When you are changing your material parameters, double-click in the preview sample image to refresh the preview with the new parameters, or click on the Refresh Preview button (green double-arrow icon). During the preview, the green icon will be replaced by a red square icon, to indicate that it is calculating your preview. 

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Pressing the lock icon in the lower right of the Preview will enable real-time editing of all material settings - the preview will update as soon as you change a setting. Unlock it to return to normal mode - you have to double-click the Refresh Preview button for the preview to refresh.

Creating your own preview scenes

Any MXS file can be used as a preview scene - you only need to have a material in that scene called "preview" which is applied to an object, and you also need to have a light source in the scene (Environment lighting or Emitters). The "preview" material will be replaced by your current material when previewing the scene.

To have your MXS preview scene show up in the right-click menu, place it in the "preview" folder of your Maxwell Render install folder.

Tip
  • Try to make your preview scenes as efficient as possible to get fast previews - for example a simple object and one emitter is usually enough.
  • Use approximately the same scale for your objects in the preview scenes compared to the scale of the objects you plan to use this material on to get a better idea of how it will look on those objects.
  • Create different scenes for different purposes - if you want to see better what a transparent material will look like for example, place something behind it to see how much it refracts the light.

 

 

 

3. BSDF Properties

Contains the parameters to control the main physical behavior for each material component.

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The BSDF properties of a material

4. Surface Properties

Parameters to control the surface properties of a material (mainly the physical roughness or smoothness of the surface itself).

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The Surface properties of a material

5. Subsurface Properties

Parameters to control the internal behavior in case of a translucent material, commonly referred to as Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS). 

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 The Subsurface properties of a material