Every object in a scene has a material that defines how it looks in the rendered image. Each material provides connection points — or ports — for all of the object’s attributes. By attaching shaders to these ports, you define the object’s surface.
This chapter explains how to assign materials to objects in your scene, as well as how to manage materials using material libraries.
It also describes how to work with surface shaders, which are frequently used to define an object’s basic surface shading characteristics (diffuse lighting, ambience, transparency, reflectivity, and so on).
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