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APRIL 06, 2004
Getting Amorphous in Amorphium, Part 2
Introducing textures and height maps into the process
David Nagel
Working with materials in Amorphium 3
So now that you have some texture files to work with, launch Amorphium. If you haven't already, create an object using the method described in Part 1 of this series. When it's ready, click on the Material tab in Amorphium. The first thing you're going to want to add is a texture file for the object's Diffuse Color. (Diffuse Color is the surface color of the object, like the paint on your house.) To load your texture file as the Diffuse Color, click on the pull-down menu, and select "Texture" from the list of choices. A dialog box will pop up asking you to locate your texture file.
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After you apply the Diffuse texture, you're going to have to do one intermediate tweak on it. Click on the Mapper tab in Amorphium. Select the Apply Spheric tool, and click once on your object.
This wraps your texture around your object.
After you do this, go back to the Material tab. Now you can begin to apply other types of materials to your object. In short, here's what the different categories of material properties do.
- Diffuse Color: The basic surface color of your object.
- Specular Color: Defines highlights. The color you choose is the color where bright spots will appear.
- Specular Roughness: Higher values differentiate more clearly between highlighted and non-highlighted areas. In other words, a hjigher roughness value makes your highlights less smooth.
- Ambient Color: Simulates ambient light affecting your object.
- Transparency: A higher value makes you object more transparent. Increasing this setting increases render time but can produce delicate, wispy effects on complex objects. A texture can be used for transparency, in which case the texture's luminosity values will be used to determine different degrees of transparency across the object according to the placement of the map.
- Refraction: Determines how much light will refract in a transparent object. If you use a texture, the texture will be treated as a refraction "map," where the luminosity of the map determines the differences in refraction on the object. Increasing the refraction value has a heavy impact on render times.
- Reflectivity: Sets the reflectiveness of your surface. Again, a texture can be used, but the texture will be treated as a luminance map. Hi Reflectivity settings will have a heavy impact on render times and usually won't contribute much to the outcome unless you have a specific need for reflections.
- Bump: This uses you texture as a map to simulate surface depth. It doesn't actually affect the geometry of your object, but it will appear as if it had in your final render.
For now, here are the values I'm using for my materials.
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