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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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All three approaches can be useful, even if your plugin fully supports all Maxwell material parameters. For example you may wish to quickly open and edit an MXM file (a Maxwell material file) found on your machine. For this, MXED can be very practical.

 

Noteinfo

While the Material Editor is implemented inside all the compatible plugins, the interface and/or functionality can be different depending on each 3D platform, but the underlying principles remain the same.

The information below shows the main areas of the material editor found in Maxwell Studio and MXED. In your 3D platform the interface may be slightly different.

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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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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

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You have three color modes available for selecting colors: RGB, Hue Saturation Value (HSV) and xyz.