The With the Maxwell Ref Material shader operator stands for the layered material system used by Maxwell Render. Maxwell Render’s materials are made up of different “components” such as BSDF (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function) and Coating, Emitter or Displacement. These components are organized into layers which are stacked one on top of the other. This special hierarchy is represented by tabs and multilist controls on the interface of the Maxwell Material node.
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The main tab of the Maxwell Material node contains the following global properties. - Load MXM: load the material description from the specified .mxm file. The SHOP node is renamed to the name of the loaded material.
- Reload: updates the parameters from the .mxm file. This button is useful if the .mxm file has changed outside Houdini (for example edited with the Material Editor).
- Save MXM: exports the material to the given .mxm file.
- Show Preview: calls Mxed to calculate preview of the material by the current settings. The preview image is displayed in MPlay.
- Edit in Material Editor: opens the Material Editor (Mxed) with the current parameters which provides a user-friendly interface to edit the material. After the material is saved and the editor is closed, the plug-in reloads the material parameters automatically.
- Dispersion: enables / disables the dispersion calculations. Dispersion is the effect which can be seen when different wavelengths of light are refracted at slightly different angles as they pass through a material. The amount of dispersion can be controlled with the Abbe parameter of the BSDF component.
- Shadow: enables / disables the shadow catcher, used for compositing purposes.
- Matte: enables / disables matte properties for this material.
- Material ID Color: specifies color identifier for the material, useful for compositing.
- Global Bump Mapping: enables using global bump map which will affect the whole material, alongside the bump of each individual BSDF.
- Bump Strength: specifies the strength of the bumps.
- Bump Texture: specifies a bump texture where brighter values will create bumps on the surface and darker values will create indents. A color map can be used as a bump map but only the grayscale information of the map will be used.
- Use Bump Texture As Normal Map: if checked, the given bump texture will be used as a global normal map. A normal map has the advantage specifying an angle, or the direction of the bumps while bump map can simulate only the up / down direction.
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Layer properties
Image Removedyou can reference an MXM material from the disc. You can build up a material library and quickly re-use previously created materials on other projects. Ensures also that your materials have a consistent look between different scenes, since the same material reference will be used in all scenes. A referenced material can still be edited at any time from the plug-in using MXED.
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Material properties
The interface of the reference material is pretty simple, you just have to define the MXM you want to use in the scene.
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- MXM: path of the MXM file to reference in the scene.
- MXS Export: specifies how the referenced material is exported to the Maxwell scene.
New: opens MXED with an empty material. After you finished editing and save the material in MXED it is added to this Maxwell Ref Material.
Edit: opens MXED to edit the referenced material.
Preview: opens MXED to calculate preview of the material by the current settings. The preview image is displayed in MPlay.