Material Editor
Introduction
Your inputs may be just right for the purpose, however it can be useful to change the way they work under lighting by allowing them to emit light themselves, change how they reflect light or even add a bump map.
The Material Editor is opened when you press Edit Material in the input area of the main screen.
There are some buttons along the top and material thumbnails on the right. The currently selected material details are shown centrally.
Tip: Materials have no affect if there is no lighting in the world
A Warning
Materials, unlike lights (but like skyboxes), are saved independently of the project. This allows you to have a pool of materials available all the time and not to have to create them each time you start a new project. The disadvantage of this however is that if you alter an existing material and it is used by another project, that other project will have an altered output as well. Generally over time you will create all the materials you need so it will not be a problem but to start with think about copying a material you want to edit and leave the old one as it is. For safety materials can also be locked.
Default Material and Locking
Because of the issues raised above you can lock a material to prevent accidental modification. As an extra precaution the first material, the default one used by all inputs by default (it does nothing) is permanently locked and cannot be unlocked. All materials used by the sample projects are locked by default.
Toolbar Buttons
- New - creates a new material, since these are saved separately to the project file you must first input a filename for the new material.
- Save - just a safety feature allowing you to save the material at any time. All the materials get saved automatically when you exit T2 anyway.
- Copy - allows you to make a copy of the current material.
- Load Bump - allows you to browse for a graphic file to use as a bump map - see below for details.
- Delete - you can delete the current material. Mote: this deletes it from disk and any other inputs (including ones in other projects) will use the default material instead.
- Toggle Lock - toggle between locked and unlocked, see note above.
- Close - closes this screen.
Material Parameters
The sliders and bump map all relate to the current material. To select the current material click on the thumbnail text to the right. Note: if the material is locked you will not be able to change any of the parameters.
Emissive Colour
A material can be made to emit light, to glow. This light does not affect anything surrounding the material it just applies to the input using this material. You enter the colour you want the material to emit, be careful not to overload the colours (see lights for more information on this). It can be nice to have a crystal material for example that emits red light. If applied to a input, even if that input is in shadow it will emit a red glow. The sample projects often use snow that emits a slight blue light.
Reflection Level
Inputs that use this material will reflect light, this parameter allows you to determine how reflective the input is. So for example if you had a metal input texture you could make it very shiny so it will stand out when lit.
Bump Map Image
The image in the middle of this screen shows an optional bump map. A bump map is a way of applying more detailed geometry to an input than is obtained from the heightmap. This is just used to create the lighting and does not affect the mesh view at all. Look at the chocolate example to see this in action. It uses a flat height map (all black) and a fairly plain texture. The bump map causes the lighting calculations to think there is geometry on the surface and so creates light and dark colours that makes the surface look as if it is in 3D even though it is not. Of course this is not like a true bump map as it does not change when viewed based on the viewers angle - it is burned into the texture.
Tip: When experimenting with bump maps test them first using the flat height map as it can be difficult to see how well they are working when they are merged in with other materials.
The ChocolateBumpTest project uses just one input and a flat heightmap and shows how a bump map can change the lighting:
Tile
Below the bump map image is a slider (not shown above) that allows the bump map to be tiled relative to the input using it. This can be useful to add finer bumps to an input.
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