Manual Reference Material Manager Material Editor
Material Basic Color Diffusion Luminance Transparency Reflection Environment Fog Bump Normal Alpha Specular Specular Color Glow Displacement Illumination AssignColor
The settings on this page define the basic color of the material, such as RGB 255/0/0 for red. If you want to create a more complicated material, such as a checkered pattern that uses several colors, you can load a texture. The texture is layered above the color.
If you want to see the color only and not the texture, set the Mix Strength value to 0%.
You can specify a color on most of the material channel pages using a color chooser. For details on how to use the color chooser, look up color chooser.
Use this setting to adjust the brightness of a channel’s color. The Brightness setting functions somewhat like a multiplier and can be set to greater than 100%.
Here an image texture or a 2D shader can be defined. Refer to the Textures chapter for details.
Use these parameters to mix the color and texture panes using one of four modes. The default mode for all channels is Normal, except for the Environment page, which uses Multiply as the default mode. Not all channels have Mix settings. If you load a texture or a 2D shader, it is placed on a layer above the color (i.e. the texture is placed on top of the color).
In normal mode, the Mix Strength sets the opacity of the texture. If the value is set to 100%, you’ll see the texture only (remember, the texture is the top layer, so if it is opaque you won’t see the color underneath). If the value is set to 70%, the result is 70% of the texture and 30% of the color.
For example, if a texture pixel of RGB 255/0/0 (red) is used with a color value of RGB 255/255/0 (yellow) with the Mix Strength set to 50%, the resultant color is 255/128/0 (orange).
The texture’s RGB value is added to the color’s RGB value. Color channel values cannot exceed the maximum of RGB 255. So if a texture pixel of RGB 0/255/255 (cyan) is added to a color value of 255/255/0 (yellow), the result is 255/255/255 (white).
The color’s RGB value is subtracted from the texture’s RGB value. Thus if a texture pixel is RGB 255/255/255 (white) and the color value is 255/0/0 (red), subtracting with Mix Strength set to 100% gives the result 0/255/255 (cyan).
The RGB value of the texture is multiplied by the RGB value of the color. For example RGB 255/128/0 (orange) multiplied by RGB 0/255/0 (green) results in RGB 0/128/0 (dark green).
Mix Strength defines the mixing proportion between the texture and color panes.