# material basics Working with materials in 3d applications is a complicated business. There are a surprising amount of parameters and options when it comes to building and applying materials. ## material vocabulary This is a limited list of some terms you will hear when learning about 3d materials. I will fill in more terms as we discover them together. - **Materials**: Materials determine how the surfaces of an object are rendered. The different material properties include color tones, transparency, reaction to light (matte or shiny), texture, and how it unfolds on an object, etc.  The properties of a material are determined by the shader it uses - **Shaders**: Shaders are scripts that contain mathematical calculations and algorithms that allow determining the rendering of each object according to the lighting and the properties assigned to the equipment.  It is the shaders that determine the properties of materials. - **Texture**: Textures are bitmaps used by materials to give 3D objects their “graphic” appearance. Certain other types of textures (examples: normal map, height map, etc.) can also be used to determine other material properties (relief, reflectivity, roughness, etc. - **Physically Based Rendering (PBR)**: Materials that approximate physical properties of objects in the real world, such as roughness, reflectivity, shininess, etc. - **Albedo**: The material’s color map and is also called **Diffuse** or **BaseColor**. - **Metalness**: Determines if a material is metallic and which parts are metallic. This adds shine and reflection to the material. - **Roughness**: Determines how rough or smooth a surface is and affects the sharpness or blurriness of the reflections and highlights on a surface. - **Normal Map**: Adds detail to a surface without having to add more polygons Examples of detail might be pitting and dents on a metal surface or grain in wood. It is just an image that gives the appearance of a texture. Think of it as a sticker on the geometry. - **Bump Map**: An image that gives illusion of depth but doesn't change the geometry. Applied separately from the Normal Map. - **Displacement Map** An image that actually changes the geometry. Need to have enough sub-divisions in the geometry for the surface change to work. Adds plenty of rendering time due to extra geometric complexity. - **Ambient Occlusion**: Used to add soft shading and contact shadows to a model. It's a grayscale map that indicates which areas of a model receive full lighting (white) or full shade (black). - **Baking** or **Prelighting**: Saving materials and lighting directly into a model to save time during rendering. It is like a “Save As” merging information together. Baking removes the need to include shading and lighting when rendering. - **UV Mapping**: Controls how a texture is applied to the geometry, essentially the coordinates of vertexes, edges, and faces of the It is a flat 2d version of the 3d model - **UV Unwrapping**: The process of converting the 3d UV to an editable 2d map. - **UV Projection**: Controls how the UV map/texture is applied to geometry. a spherical projection is going to look different than a cube projection. --- > [!info]- tools to build complex materials > Maya has a pretty good materials engine with the inclusion of Arnold. There are other standalone systems available… > > - [[materials - arnold]] - built directly into maya > - [adobe substance suite](https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d/3d-augmented-reality.html) - substance is the industry standard for making materials. now part of the adobe universe. > - <https://armorpaint.org/> - a free standalone material building system > - <https://quixel.com/mixer> part of the megascans universe. works with unreal engine. > - <http://www.pixaflux.com/index.html> generate materials. not sure how/if it plugs back into maya. --- Learn more… - <https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Arnold+for+Maya+User+Guide> - <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/remote-rendering/tutorials/modeling/maya-material-setup> - <https://www.youtube.com/c/ArvidSchneider> - <https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2023/ENU/Maya-Modeling/files/GUID-FDCD0C68-2496-4405-A785-3AA93E9A3B25-htm.html> --- tags: #3d #maya #resources home: [[! 3d modeling- maya]]