DGS Material (mental ray)

Note: The button to the right of each control is a shortcut shader button. Clicking one of these buttons displays the Material/Map Browser so you can assign a shader to this component. When a map or a shader has been assigned to a component, this button displays the letter “M,” and the comparable button on the Shaders rollout displays the map or shader name.

Diffuse—Click the color swatch to display a Color Selector and change the material's diffuse color.

Glossy Highlights—Click the color swatch to display a Color Selector and change the color of glossy highlights.

Specular—Click the color swatch to display a Color Selector and change the color of mirror reflections. When the specular color is white, the material is 100 percent reflective, like a mirror. When the specular color is black, the material does not reflect any of its surroundings.

Shiny—Sets the width of glossy highlights. The larger this value, the smaller the highlights. Default=30.0.

Transparency—Specifies the transparency. The effective range of Transparency is from 0.0 to 1.0. At 0.0 the material is fully opaque. At 1.0 it is fully transparent. Default=0.0.

Warning: You can set the value of Transparency to be greater than 1.0, but this has no effect. An anomaly of the user interface for shaders in the mental ray and lume libraries is that spinner values are not “clamped” to lie within their effective ranges, as they are for controls in Autodesk VIZ.

The value of Transparency also indirectly specifies the reflectivity of the material, which is calculated as 1.0 minus the Transparency value.

Index Of Refraction—Specifies the IOR. In the physical world, the IOR results from the relative speeds of light through the transparent material and the medium the eye or the camera is in. Typically this is related to the object's density. The higher the IOR, the denser the object. Default=1.5.

See Extended Parameters Rollout (Standard Material) for a list of IOR values for commonly encountered materials.

Note: When the IOR equals 1.0, there is no refraction, and calculating the transparency can take less time than when the material is refractive.

The controls on this rollout let you assign a map or shader to one of the basic parameters of the DGS material. This is comparable to mapping a component of a standard material; by adding shaders, you can create a shader tree that generates complex effects.

Click the button for a component to display the Material/Map Browser and assign the map or shader. Use the toggle at the left to turn the effect of the map off or on.

The button to the right of each main shader button is for shaders that can return multiple parameters. If a shader that returns multiple parameters is assigned to the component, the button's tooltip shows the parameter name. Clicking the button displays a Connect Parameter To Shader dialog, which lets you change which parameter is being used.

Important: UV Coordinates and XYZ Coordinates are the only shaders with multiple return values provided with Autodesk VIZ. You might encounter multiple return values in shaders provided with other shader libraries or custom shader code.

For all the DGS material components, the available mental ray shaders are the same: