Definition of Surfaces

3D modeling packages allow you to give the surfaces of your 3D model different properties. These surface properties allow you to apply textures to the model, define its color, et cetera. When you import a model into Blaze 3D Studio, these surface selections appear in the ‘Materials’ tab to allow you to apply lighting and adjust their properties. 

Note: Different 3D packages use different names for these surface properties. For example, Maya refers to surface properties as shaders while 3DS Max refers to them as materials. We shall refer to these surface properties as ‘surfaces’ from now on.

Definition of Shaders

The Blaze renderer uses specific ‘shaders’ to render an object as efficiently as possible.  For example, the effort to render a flat colour (not textured) on a polygon is much lower than that for a textured version. The ‘shader’ used by Blaze to ensure the model is rendered as fast as possible depends on the set up of the surface from the 3D package. 

Using Surfaces in Blaze 3D

Currently only certain combinations of surfaces are supported by Blaze 3D.  For example, it is not possible to use transparency AND bump mapping on the same surface.  Below is a list of all the supported surface combinations in Blaze 3D.

Supported surface combinations:

This document will be updated as more surface combinations are supported by Blaze 3D.

The images used for surfaces are processed to suit the selected Blaze 3D environment and can therefore only be used for one task. For example, you cannot use the same image for the texture and the bump map.  It is, however, perfectly valid to re-use the same image on multiple surfaces, provided it is for the same use. An example of re-using a surface image is if you use the same bump map image on all of the surfaces, provided it is set to the bump map channel of these surfaces. There are minor variations but that will be discussed in a later document.