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Materials

Materials define the way objects look in Forger. The material editor allows the creation of new materials, modify existing ones and assign materials to objects.

Creating Materials

New materials can be created by pressing the add (+) button in the top right corner of the Materials menu. The interface will pop up an input alert asking you for a material name. After accepting the name, the view will move into material editing mode.

When in editing mode, you can delete materials by pressing the trash button. The default material cannot be deleted.

Applying Materials

Materials can be applied to selected objects by pressing the ”Apply to Selection” button that can be seen whilst editing them or by dragging and dropping onto meshes.

Note

Any Forger scene, new or old will contain a material named "default_material", this material cannot be deleted, but can be modified.

Material Parameters

Material behaviors in Forger are controlled by their parameters, each material type has different parameters that can be one of the following:

  • Constant: A color, decimal or boolean number. Its value does not vary across the surfaces it is applied to.
  • Texturable - Color: A color image, that can vary across the surfaces that it is applied to based on the UVs and the values located near the texels of those coordinates.
  • Texturable - Scalar: A scalar image (in linear space, black and white), that can vary across the surfaces that it is applied to based on the UVs and the values located near the texels of those coordinates.

Material Types

Standard

This material type is used for all painting and is the regular type of material. It's a physically-based, gamma-correct material that can represent many kinds of surfaces. It also has texturable parameters that you can use to have further control over the shading of the surfaces using it.

This material factors in Environment Lighting if you have set any from the "IBLs" section in the objects menu.

  • Base Color: (texturable - color). The diffuse base color of the surface.
  • Metalness: (texturable - scalar). Represents how "metallic" the material is, with a value of 1.0 it will be fully metallic, values closer to 0.0 will make the material appear non-metallic. Note that although the metallic model has no diffuse component, it has a tinted incident specular.
  • Specular: Incident (maximum) specular amount. This is in lieu of an explicit index of refraction.
  • Specular Tint: A concession for artistic control, this parameter tints incident specular toward the base color. Note: grazing specular is still achromatic (i.e. in the specularTint parameter doesn't tint incoming light at grazing angles).
  • Roughness: (texturable - scalar). Controls the glossiness of specular reflections, the lower the value, the sharper the reflection. A value of 0.0 will result in a mirror-like reflection while a value of 1.0 will create reflections closer to a rubber-like diffuse reflection, any value in-between will result in blurred reflections.
  • Emit Color: Emission energy, non-black values give the appearance that the material is emitting incandescence.

LitSphere

  • Constant Color: Defines the color to use if the viewport display is set to constant mode and the "Override Constant Color" parameter is enabled.
  • Override Constant Color: Use this if the litsphere/matcap image does not have the edges roughly of the same color as the material. This may be the case for some LitSphere/MatCap images that weren't generated the best way.
  • Ignore Light Direction: This option makes the LitSpheres ignore the light direction and look exactly as they do in the image itself, when this option is enabled, the image is "projected" from the default directional light "default_light".

Note

The LitSphere material type is not influenced by Image Based Lighting.

Blinn

This is the legacy material type, it has been kept in Forger because it's useful for sculpting as gamma correct materials present harsher light-to-shadow transitions. That although more correct, can be hard to sculpt with given that it may hide forms.

  • Diffuse: Defines the object’s color when a light is emitted onto its surface.
  • Specular: Defines the effect the material has on the reflected light.
  • Shininess: Controls the size and brightness of the specular reflection.

Note

The Blinn material type is not influenced by Image Based Lighting.