The Global Properties of a material in the Material Editor
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Above all the layers in the material tree, you can see the Global Material Properties panel, that contains several parameters that affect globally the material as a whole.
Type
- Embedded: The material will be embedded in the scene you are editing and included inside the MXS scene file when exported.
- Referenced: Allows you to load a reference to a MXM material file in your disk. Referencing materials is very interesting to create a materials repository for a project, and force all the materials to be taken from there as references. Having the materials centralized this way on a repository allows you to unify and adjust them whenever you want, and all the scenes will take the latest version when they are rendered.
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Choose the type of material, from the different Material Assistants or a Custom type, or a Referenced MXM (Maxwell material file).
Override map
This setting lets you override all the projection properties of any other texture used in the material. This can be very useful if you want to for example make sure that all the textures are using the same repeat setting for the tiling. To use it, set the projection parameters you want and close the window. Then open the Texture Picker of any texture used in the material and in the Projection properties make sure that "Use Override map" is checked. This texture will then use the projection properties specified in the Override Map texture picker.
Global Bump/Normal map
In addition to the Bump/Normal maps you can have on in the different BSDF on BSDFs off your material, you can specify an additional global Bump/Normal map which will affect the whole material, alongside the bump of each individual BSDF.
Displacement
In case your material have different Displacement maps (on different Layers, one Displacement component per Layer), Maxwell will only take one of those Displacement maps (to ensure the continuity of the surface). This option allows you to specify which Displacement component belonging to a Layer should be used for the whole material when rendering. Even though you can apply one displacement component per Layer, only one of them will be used for rendering.
Dispersion
This option allows you to enable/disable the dispersion calculations on your material. As the light dispersion calculations on transmissive materials are relatively time consuming, this option is disabled by default. For more information about dispersion and the Abbe parameters, see the Transmissive Properties section.
Shadow
Enable/disable the shadow catcher properties for this material. Whenever you want a shadow pass including the shadows cast over certain surface, you have to enable this option on that surface surfaces material, and enable the Shadow Channel option on the Render Options as well. See below a further explanation and example.
Matte
Enabling his option allows you to turn the material into a matte material, which “cuts” through the entire image and reveals the background (IBL or Physical Sky if enabled; black if no environment lighting is used). Useful for compositing purposes. See below a further explanation and example.
Material Id
You can specify a desired custom color to be used to identify this material in the Material Id channel. If you don't specify any custom color, Maxwell picks a different random color for each material on your scene.
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