Material Wizard

IRender nXt Material Wizard

Material Wizard

Applies reflection and transparency directly to SketchUp materials. Changes are made easily with a slider bar.

IRender nXt sets multiple settings for a single material - such a setting both transparency and index of refraction for glass materials.

Set reflection and other material settings

The IRender Material Wizard makes it easy to create and edit materials.

Most common rendering settings for materials can be made quickly in the Material Wizard.

For more advanced settings, or to see a preview of your settings, use the [[[Advanced Material Editor]].


The Material Wizard is invoked by right clicking on a SketchUp entity which can have a material, and selecting: IRender: Create or Edit Material. (If it does not have a material yet, a new one will be created.)

It is also invoked from the Select Material wizard which allows you to select SketchUp materials, add them to you model, and edit their rendering properties - All before placing the materials on faces.

Contents

Defaults

Material Defaults

For many standard materials, you can use one of the Material Defaults on the left of the Material Wizard:

  • Matte - no reflection, transparency or special properties
  • Thin or Thick Glass - 90% transparent.
Thin should be used for glass created with a single face.
Thick should be used for glass with two faces - one for each side.
  • Plastic - low transparency, and somewhat blurry
  • Reflective - medium reflection
  • Metal - highly reflective, with Metallic highlights.
  • Mirror - 100% reflective
  • Shade - creates a Translucent lamp shade
  • Glow - creates a material which glows like a light


Main Tab

Main tab.jpg

Base Color - set the color or materials without a texture.

Reflection and Highlight' The two sliders combine to define the amount of reflection and the sharpness of reflection.

Metallic - highlight are reflected in the color of the reflective material.

(Otherwise highlights are reflected in white)
See: Metallic Reflection

Glossy - highlights are other reflections are blurry.

See: * Glossy Reflection

No Light Source Reflections - does not show reflections of lights.

See: No Light Source Reflections

Intensity of the reflection. 1.000 is fully reflective.

Sharpness - values less than 1.000 create blurry reflections

See also


Transparency Tab

Transparency tab.jpg
  • Transparency - this will be used to set the transparency in SketchUp as well.
  • Refraction this is the amount that light is distorted as it passes through thick glass.
  • Translucency allows light to pass through the material, but not visibility - as with a lamp shade.

Special Properties

  • Daylight defines any face containing this material as a Daylight Portal ] - which does a much better job of rendering sunlight and sky which illuminates interior scenes.
  • Caustic - defines the material as caustic which produces prism like effects when light passes through the material.
  • Thick defines the faces containing the material as thick. This should be used whenever more than a single face is used to define glass - separated by a distance to represent the thickness of the glass. See: Thin - Thick
  • Monte Carlo - sets a special light dispersion mode. (We haven't seen a good example of this working yet.)
  • Gather - sets a special light dispersion mode. (We haven't seen a good example of this working yet.)

More Sliders

Click the More button to display additional special transparency settings:

  • Attenuation
  • Dispersion
  • Saturation


Texture Tab

Texture tab.jpg

Sets special bump effects.

Each bump effect has special settings which define it.


  • Auto Bump
the Bump strength should be between -5.0 and 5.0
The Color strength defines how much of the color of the bump texture is used as part of the material definition. For pure bump maps, (which define the depth of the material, but not the pattern), this should be 0. If you are using a texture - such as stucco - as both a texture and a bump map, you should set this to 1.


  • Procedural Bumps There are 5 procedural bumps which can be used to give your material (with or without textures) a different appearance.
Each Bump type has parameters to change its size, etc.
Pyramid-bump.jpg
A Pyramid bump was applied to the salt shaker, and a sandpaper bump was applied to the pepper shaker.


Glow Tab

Self Glow

Self Glow illuminates a surface as if it had light shining on it, without actually making it a light. For objects which you want to appear bright, but which don't need to illuminate other objects, this is much faster than making lights out of them.

Television with 10% self-glow
Glow tab.jpg

Defines a material which glows with Self Glow, or acts as a light with Illumination.

  • Illuminance - the faces which contain this texture will act as lights.
Set the desired Wattage
  • Self Glow - the face glows, but does not illuminate other surfaces. This is the best setting or Neon lights.
Set the glow percentage - 0 to 100%

See also: Glow


Advanced

Material Wizard - Advanced

Sets multiple settings for a single material - such a setting both transparency and index of refraction for glass materials.

Transparency settings in Material Wizard

The Advanced button loads the nXt Advanced Material Editor which allows you to place additional, advanced settings on your material.

Some of the tabs are the same as the Tab section of the Material Wizard. Some of the tabs have additional features.

See: Advanced Material Editor



See also