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Dan Abrams, http://folio.superbaka.com
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Before explaining the material parameters used in the Maxwell material system, it is important to have a basic understanding of what light is, how it interacts with materials and why a material looks shiny, dull, transparent etc. Please review this information as it will make the parameters in the Maxwell material editor much easier to understand.
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What is light?
Visible light is really a very small portion in a range of electromagnetic radiation. This radiation travels in waves of different wavelengths. The difference in wavelengths (the “tops” of each wave) is what makes the difference between blue, red, gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves etc. “White light” is a combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum. When we perceive an object as red for example, what really happens is that white light falls on a red surface, and all the wavelengths except those that give red light are absorbed by the material. Only the red portion of the spectrum is reflected back.
Diffuse – Specular & Reflected light
We see an object because light is reflected from its surface into our eyes. That is, all light is reflected light. This may sound confusing at first because it has become common in renderers to refer to reflected light as specular (or sharply) reflected light.
In the real world light does not have a separate “diffuse” or “specular” part. So what makes a surface look dull, or mirror like? It is the smoothness of that surface.
A surface which is not very smooth has tiny imperfections which scatter the light in all directions, thus creating a very “diffuse” reflection of its environment. So it is the reflection of light from an uneven or granular surface, resulting in an incoming light wave being reflected at a number of angles.
A surface which scatters almost all light in a chaotic, diffuse way is called a “lambertian” surface, such as the red ball on the left. Lambertian reflectance means that light falling on a surface is scattered in such a way that the apparent brightness of the surface is the same, regardless of the observer’s angle of view. Or else: the surface’s luminance is the same regardless of angle of view. Many rough surfaces, such as unfinished wood, exhibit lambertian reflectance.
Diffuse (or lambertian) versus specular surfaces
A smooth surface however reflects light uniformly and creates a very sharp or specular reflection of its environment. Specular reflection is the perfect, mirror-like reflection of light from a surface, in which light from a single incoming direction is reflected into a single outgoing reflection, as for example with a mirror (above right).
It is important to note that because very smooth surfaces reflect light perfectly, they reflect much less of their own color. This is visible in the example above, where the ball is still tinted red, but as it is a tinted mirror, its own color shows much less. There are a few exceptions however and one of them is metals. Even if a metal is very smooth, it still reflects its own color much more.
Transparency
An object becomes transparent when light does not stop at the surface, but goes through the object and out the other side. When light passes through a material, it slows down because the material is denser than vacuum. Because of this change in speed, the light is bent, or refracted, when going from vacuum (or air) into the material. This refraction occurs whenever light changes speed, so it happens when it moves from one material to another with different densities. The refraction is also what causes “caustics”: concentrated pools of light.
In the example below, it is refraction that makes the magnifying glass distortion, and creates the caustics pattern. Different materials make light slow down more or less, relative to the speed of light in air or vacuum. This difference between lightspeed in vacuum <--> lightspeed in medium, is specified as the index of refraction (IOR, also called Nd) for that particular medium.
A transparent surface
The Fresnel Effect
The Fresnel effect is the apparent increase/decrease of a surfaces reflectance based on viewing angle. For example, if you look at your monitor screen straight on, the monitor glass shows almost no reflection, but if you look at it from an angle almost parallel to the glass, it has become very reflective. The Fresnel effect is dependent on the Nd of the material. The higher the Nd, the more reflective the material becomes at ALL angles, so the Fresnel effect diminishes: the material becomes equally reflective at all angles.
It is important to understand this effect in order to create realistic materials. A plastic material with Nd (refraction index) set too high would become unrealistically reflective, even when viewed straight on. It would behave more like a metal than a plastic.
The same plastic material with Nd=1.6 (left) and Nd=30 (right)
A word on "color" when creating materials
When you specify a color via the UI, Maxwell takes that RGB input and converts it into "spectral space", meaning it treats the "color" values as wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, having different amounts of energy. The range of possible energy values reflected off an object or transmitted through it, is much greater in the real world than the 0-255 range of an RGB color picker. It is therefore important to remember that when you specify a color, having a certain brightness, you are also defining how much energy that color has, not just its hue. A brighter color will have greater energy than a dark one. This is important both for creating reflective solid materials, and transparent materials.For example a material with the same hue of red but with varying values (brightness) will produce varying degrees of transparency because the brighter version of the hue contains more energy.
It will be much easier to control the material parameters in Maxwell if you separate in your mind the hue of a color and it's value (brightness). It will be easier if you choose the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) mode of your color picker if the UI allows it (The Maxwell Studio color picker has this mode).
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Working with material "Types" vs the advanced material editor
In Maxwell V3 we introduced the concept of material Types, which use a reduced set of intuitive parameters that greatly simplify and speed up the material creation process. These are the current simplified Types available:
- Metal (all kinds of metals)
- Opaque (any kind of opaque diffuse or shiny materials such as solid plastics, shiny wooden floors, concrete etc.)
- Transparent (all transparent glass and plastic materials which are not translucent - ie, they do not have sub surface scattering)
- Translucent (all transparent and semi transparent materials which are translucent - plastics, marble, milk)
- Car paint (for creating multilayered paints such as metallic car paint)
- Cloth (useful for velvet, satin, and any other types of cloth)
- AGS (special transparent material useful for speeding up interior renders - see the Architectural Glass Solution (AGS) page for details)
Besides these simplified types there are also 3 general material "categories":
- Emitter (for creating light emitting materials and light projectors)
- Custom (this simply switches the material editor to the advanced version)
- MXM Reference (lets you load an external standalone Maxwell material file (.MXM) - see the Referenced Materials page for details).
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It is important to note that these simplified Types do nothing more than simplify the UI of material creation, adjusting behind the scenes several parameters in the advanced editor - there is no difference in render quality between using Types or custom materials created from scratch using the advanced editor. |
Converting a material created using a Type to the advanced editor
When working with a Type, you can at any time click the "Convert to Advanced" button to switch the material to the advanced editor - thus revealing the full material editor. Please note that this is a one-way conversion - you can't convert this material back to a Type. This is because it's impossible to accommodate all the parameters found in the full material editor back to a certain Type, which only uses a subset of these parameters.
Should I use Types or the Advanced Editor?
Creating materials using Types has two great advantages - speed and simplicity. Even if you are already comfortable using the advanced editor, you may find that in many cases you can create materials much faster by starting from a Type rather than creating it from scratch in the advanced editor. For new users, the advanced editor seems daunting, with too many possibilities and too many parameters interacting. With Types, we have tried to give intuitive, common names to the parameters where possible, and we display only the parameters needed for that particular Type.
Types have another great benefit for new users - it keeps you from making some mistakes when creating materials which can slow down the render or produce strange results. For example you may forget you changed some parameters related to transparency in the advanced editor, when in fact you wanted to create an opaque material. If you now apply this material to a wall - strange things will happen 
So we strongly recommend to use Types if you are new to Maxwell, and also keep in mind it is a starting point for understanding the advanced editor.
The disadvantage of simplicity is that it offers you less flexibility. Even though the Types will allow you to create well over 90% of commonly used materials, there will be cases where you want a more complex material with several different layers, multiple highlights, more subtle control etc. So when you start feeling comfortable with Maxwell and the simplified Types, we encourage you to check out the the documentation and examples of the advanced editor - you will find that some of the parameters have exactly the same name as in the Types, which makes transition easier, while others are based on common naming conventions from the physics of light interaction.