Material Assistants

Different materials created in seconds with the Material Assistants

Traditionally, materials were the hardest topic to master for CG user. Material Assistant is a new, easy tousematerial editor which builds the basicmaterialcharacterisitcs for you - greatly simplifying the material creation process and saving you lots of time. Choose first a category such as glass, metal, translucent, opaque and the material assistant will help you create perfectly optimised materials for your scene in just seconds. 

Some Material Assistants to ease the creation of the most usual materials. Here are the assistants for Opaque, Transparent, Translucent and Hair materials

The assistants, under the hood, make use of the same Maxwell material shader, but only show a few parameters to make things easier for you. If you want to check how these material are actually made, you can always click the button to "Convert to Advanced" and you will see how they translate to layers and BSDFs. The available types are the following:

• AGS (from Architectural Glass Solution): it generates a glass without refractions (so you only have reflections) that renders very fast; it's good for glasses in a frame.
• Opaque: simple opaque material that allows controlling the color and shininess of the material with very few parameters.
• Transparent: you can generate transparent materials like glass, frosted glass, water, ice, diamond, emerald,...
• Metal: shiny or rough aluminium, 24K jewlery gold, mirror,...
• Translucent: materials with subsurface scattering (SSS) can be tricky to setup; this assistant tries to make it easier; you have some presets like red wax, silicone gel, milk, honey,...
• Car Paint: an easy way to create a good looking car paint with flakes, top coat, etc.
• Hair: this material is meant to work with our hair primitive which is used with tools like Hair and Fur, etc.
• TableBrdf: this is a connexion to use MERL Materials database (TableBRDF)
• XRite AxF Material: this is a connection to use X-Rite AxF Materials

First steps with the Material Assistants