Extensive Material and Shader Support

Material and texture librarians. Choose from a large selection of predesigned materials and textures by clicking on small images. Also rename, delete, edit and purge entries.

Texture and Material Libraries. Program comes with a large selection of 110 texture images in TIFF and JPEG format, as well as 25 different material libraries.

Complex Material Editor. Interactively edit and preview materials using a lightning fast, 24-bit editor that allows the following shader attributes to be modified:

• Complete Color controls: Ambient, diffuse, specular and luminosity parameters can simulate a wide variety of materials such as plastics, rubber, metals and light-emitting objects.
  
  
• Interactive Color Selection. Color can be specified in either RGB, HSV, HLS, XYZ, xyY or YIQ color models. Alternatively, colors can be specified by name via a predefined database of 600 colors.
  
  
  
  
• Sophisticated transparency: Face, reflected colors and edge transparency. Fall-off value simulates glass.
  
  
• Spherical environment mapping, cubical environment mapping and planar reflectance mapping (all with MIPmap analytic filtering). Cubical and planar reflectance maps can be automatically computed on a per-object or per-polygon basis to quickly simulate ray tracing effects.
  
  
• Mist and fog atmospheric shaders. Also "depth-cueing" effects.
  
  
• Texture Modulation. Bitmap textures can be used to simultaneously modulate the material color, its bumpiness, its reflected color and its face color.
  
  
• Flat, Gouraud and Phong shading models (assignable globally or on a per-object basis).
  
  
• Phong and Blinn specular highlight lighting models.
  
  
• 'Wireframe' shader simulates a wireframe object using polygons.
  
  
• Luminosity Controls allow materials to simulate light sources.
  
  
• "Shadow Catcher" Mechanism allows shadows to be cast onto an imaginary plane or photograph (ideal for placing a 3d model into an outdoor scene).