9

Standard Material 1465
See also
DirectX 9 Shader Material (page 2–1613)
Inter face
DX Display of Standard M aterial—When on,
displays the act ive m aterial as a DX shader. You
can save the material as an FX file by clicking Save
As .FX File.
For full support of this feature, DX9 must be active.
Wa rning: Not all standard 3ds Max features can be
represented by DX shaders, and you it is possible to
create a standard material that is more complex than a
DX video card can display. DX shaders do support the
most commonly used material components: diffuse
color (or texture), specular highlights, opacity, bump
mapping, and reflections.
Save as .FX File—
Click to display a Save Effect File
dialog that lets you save the active material as an
FX file (page 3–946).
Enable P lugin M aterial—Tur n on to use the cho sen
DirectX shader in shaded v iewports. Default=off.
When not enabled, viewports continue to use
the default view por t (interactive) renderer (page
3–1030) (or the ActiveShade renderer ( page 3–17),
if that has been chosen).
This toggle is unavailable if no shader plug-in has
been chosen from the drop-down list, and when
DX Display Of Standard Material is on.
Plug-in drop-down list—U se the drop-down list to
choose a DirectX v iew port shader.
The list is unavailable when DX Display Of
Standard Material is on.
Standard Material
Material Editor > Type b utton > Material/M ap Browser
>Standard
Scooter rendered with the default standard material
Standard material is the default material in the
Material Editor sample slots. There are several
other kinds of material types (page 2–1457).
TheStandardmaterialtypeprovidesafairly
straightforward way to model surfaces. In the real
world, the appearance of a surface depends on how
it reflects light. In 3ds Max, a standard material
simulates a surface’s reflective properties. If you
don’t use maps (page 3–968),astandardmaterial
gives an object a single, uniform color.
This topic introduces the controls for Standard
material, exclusive of mapping.
Standard Color Components
A surface of a "single" color usually reflects
many colors. Standard materials typically use
a four-color model to simulate this. (There are
some variations depending on which shader (page
2–1466) you use.)
• Ambient color (page 3–908) is the color of the
object in shadow.