Creation of materials requires you to first open the Shading panel by using either the Managers > Shading command.
Once opened, the Shading panel displays six tabs (Surface, Light, Image, Rendering, Output and Globals ) on the upper left corner.
To create materials applicable to objects, select the Surface tab.
The Shader tree column on the left lists the shader types:
Color
Reflectance
Transparency
Displacement
Texture space
Emission
The name of the shader assigned is displayed between [square brackets]. <None> indicates that no shader of that class is currently assigned.
To assign a shader, just press the right mouse button (Apple key + mouse button on the Mac) when you are over a shader class: a pop-up menu will be displayed allowing you to scroll through the list of available shader of that class.
For example, press the right mouse button (Apple key + mouse button on the Mac) over the Color class and choose "blue marble". When you are over the shader you want to use, left click: the name of the chosen shader will be displayed, instead of <None>, in square brackets. In this case, you will read "blue marble".
In the middle of the panel, the Parameters column lists the shader arguments by means of which you can customize the shader. Depending on the number of arguments a shader has, the list can be scrollable or not.
As we have said before, Color, Reflectance, Transparency, and Displacement shaders are the four possible components of a material. Obviously, you do not always need to use all of them to define a material.
The Texture space shader class allows you to define the texture space when one of the four components above includes a wrapped texture. Texture mapping will be examined later in a specific paragraph.
In the Emission shader class you only find Area light. This can be used exclusively with Radiosity. Please refer to the Radiosity paragraph for details on how to use this powerful shader.
On the top right of the panel, the Object pop-up menu lets you choose the preview object shown in the small preview window.
You can choose among:
None
Current camera
Current object
Sphere (default)
Cylinder
Cube
XY plane
XZ plane
YZ plane
Note: When you choose the Current camera option, solidThinking updates in real time the Preview window at any modification of what the current camera sees. You should remember that this could slow down operations. Use it when needed.
Similarly, you can set the Resolution. Options are:
Fine
Medium
Coarse
Use Object size to change size of the preview object.
See also: