The Global Properties of a material in the Material Editor

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.

Global Bump/Normals

In addition to the Bump/Normal maps you can have on the different BSDF on 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 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.

Shadow catcher

This option can be turned on for a material and will make all objects with that material applied behave as shadow catchers. If you turn on shadow channel in the Render Options panel, all materials that have this option turned on will only render shadows. All materials with this option turned off will render white. This allows you to render a shadow-only pass for compositing purposes.

Keep in mind that the shadow pass progressively increases in quality, just like the main render. If you have both the main render channel and the shadow pass channel checked in render options, two separate images will be rendered, one being the main render, the other the shadow pass.

You can see a further explanation in the Shadow channel page.

The Shadow feature enabled on the ground material alone (left) and on all objects (right)

Matte Material

This option turns 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).

This is useful for compositing purposes. For example, if you have columns in front of an object and the columns will be rendered in another pass, you can turn on matte material for the columns, and the character will be rendered with the columns “cut” from the character. The columns will still contribute to the lighting, even with Matte material turned on.

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