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Different parts of a physical object will often be made of different substances. These will reflect light in various ways. In Blaze these reflective properties are modeled using materials. For example a chrome surface has a very sharp, bright reflection, whereas black cloth would reflect its environment in a very subtle, diffuse manner. There are a number of controls available in this section to accurately model the reflective nature of most substances.
Assigning Materials in Blaze 3D Studio
Within the "Materials" section, you are able to define and assign materials to the various sections of the 3D model. The project explorer on the left shows a tree control which has the project Blaze file as the root. The icons used in the Materials section of the tree are:
 - Defined Material
 - Surface
 - Per Pixel Surface
Materials are dependent on the Environment defined in the previous section. The visual result of each defined material within the scene is is calculated by applying various parameters to a copy of the world object image. The children of these defined materials are any surfaces of the 3D model that are assigned to them; these can be freely dragged between the materials to perform assignments.
Each of the parameters of a material is available via sliders to the right of this tree control. There are four instances or groups of the parameters for each material. Each group is labelled as a channel, which can be thought of as an element of the material and all the elements are added together to create the material. The available parameters are (brief descriptions provided also):
- Material resolution - Slider provides control over the resolution of the material's texture color map.
- RGB/HLS - Color biasing in either red, green and blue or hue luminance and saturation space.
- Gaussian Blur – The reflective properties of this material channel.
- Brightness – The strength for this material channel, allows for relative control between the channels (zero means this channel is not used).
- Saturation – The level of colour applied.
- Fresnel Effect - The effect that as your viewing angle to the surface gets closer to zero degrees, the surface becomes more reflective.
Optimising the Materials of your 3D
Each material visible in the Materials section of the project explorer tree (identified by the 'Defined Material' icon) becomes a texture when published and adds to file size. Thus to keep the file size to a minimum, ensure that any materials not used in the final project are deleted from the scene.
If after publishing, a particular material does not achieve the desired quality even at reasonable compression settings, then check the ‘compress material losslessly’ tick box. This is self explanatory but be aware that it will impact the file size significantly, it is worth trying this both on and off to see the trade offs involved. |
