The realistic material

The first and default material type is realistic. It is energetically equilibrated.

The realistic material panel

The energy preservation model

The shading model uses three basic inputs:

• Diffusion: the material base color used in a Lambertian equation.
• Reflection: how much the material reflects its environment.
• Transmission: opacity of the material.

These three inputs are involved in the energy preservation rule: the sum of the diffusion + reflection + transmission terms is always lower than or equal to 1.

Diffusion, reflection and transmission

More parameters influencing the reflection effect are available like glossiness and IOR (index of refraction).

Increasing the glossiness from 0 to 1

Bump channel

The material also contains:

• Bump: the bump map affects the surface normal of the geometry at the shaded fragment.

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Adding bump texture

Back diffuse and translucency

Two more channels are available for plants only:

• Back diffusion: same as diffusion but for the back side faces as defined by the normals.
• Translucency: how much of the back diffusion is visible versus the front diffusion.

These two channels are very useful to render plant leafs.

Plant leafs with back diffuse and translucency

Masked material

The material can be defined as masked. In this case, the transmission texture is used as a mask. A property allows to set the alpha threshold over which the geometry is masked.

Materials

The PBR metallic material