Understanding Volume Material Channels

Surface Materials define the properties of the surface of an object. The interior of the object is empty. If you were to fly through the object you would see one layer of material, emptiness, and then another layer of material. A Volume Material is applied to the entire object, both inside and out. If you were to fly through a volume material you would be surrounded by material.

When you're setting channel values for a Volume Material, you're setting up how light will interact with the object's volume. Channels control whether the interior of an object is bright, dark, shiny, or transparent.

In most cases the interior of an object will be filled with a texture. If so, the channels control the surface properties of the elements within the texture.

For example, if you apply blue spots as a Volume Material, you get a volume filled with blue spheres. The channels then control whether those spheres are bright, dark, shiny, or dull. When the interior of an object is filled with a texture, the material channels control the surface properties of the elements within the texture.

Volume Materials are made up of thirteen channels, divided into three groups:

• Color Channels
• Diffuse Color
• Ambient Color
• Specular Color
• Transparent Color
• Specular Halo
• Volume Color
• Value Channels
• Diffusion
• Ambience
• Specularity
• Volume Channels
• Base Density
• Edge Softness
• Fuzzy Factor
• Quality/Speed

The channels in the Color and Value groups work exactly as they do for surface materials, except that the channel settings are applied to the object's volume instead of its surface.

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