Material Wizard

IRender nXt Material Wizard

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.

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

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 - 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.)

Texture Tab

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.

See: Automatic Bump Maps

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.

See: Procedural Bump Maps

A Pyramid bump was applied to the salt shaker, and a sandpaper bump was applied to the pepper shaker.

Glow Tab

Television with 10% self glow

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%

Advanced

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