User Manual

Specular Exponent
Specular Exponent controls the falloff of the specular highlight. The greater the value, the
sharper the falloff, and the smoother and glossier the material appears. The basic shader
material does not provide an input for textures to control the specular exponent of the object.
Use tools from the 3D Material category when more precise control is required over the
specular exponent.
Transmittance
Transmittance controls the way light passes through a material. For example, a solid blue
sphere casts a black shadow, but one made of translucent blue plastic would cast a much lower
density blue shadow.
There is a separate opacity option. Opacity determines how transparent the actual surface is
when it is rendered. Fusion allows adjusting both opacity and transmittance separately. This
might be a bit counter-intuitive to artists who are unfamiliar with 3D software at first. It is
possible to have a surface that is fully opaque but transmits 100% of the light arriving upon it,
effectively making it a luminous/emissive surface.
Attenuation
Attenuation determines how much color is transmitted through the object. For an object to have
transmissive shadows, set the attenuation to (1, 1, 1), which means 100% of green, blue, red light
passes through the object. Setting this color to RGB (1, 0, 0) means that the material transmits
100% of the red arriving at the surface but none of the green or blue light. This allows “stained
glass” shadows.
Alpha Detail
When the Alpha Detail slider is set to 0, the Alpha channel of the object is ignored and the
entire object casts a shadow. If it is set to 1, the Alpha channel determines what portions of the
object cast a shadow.
Color Detail
The Color Detail slider modulates light passing through the surface by the diffuse color +
texture colors. Use this to throw a shadow that contains color details of the texture applied to
the object. Increasing the slider from 0 to 1 brings in more of diffuse color + texture color into
the shadow. Note that the Alpha and opacity of the object are ignored when transmitting color,
allowing an object with a solid Alpha to still transmit its color to the shadow.
Saturation
The Saturation slider controls the saturation of the color component transmitted to the shadow.
Setting this to 0.0 results in monochrome shadows.
Receives Lighting/Shadows
These checkboxes control whether the material is affected by lighting and shadows in the
scene. If turned off, the object is always fully lit and/or unshadowed.
Two-Sided Lighting
This makes the surface effectively two-sided by adding a second set of normals facing the
opposite direction on the back side of the surface. This is normally off, to increase rendering
speed, but can be turned on for 2D surfaces or for objects that are not fully enclosed, to allow
the reverse or interior surfaces to be visible as well.
Normally, in a 3D application, only the front face of a surface is visible and the back face is
culled, so that if a camera were to revolve around a plane in a 3D application, when it reached
the backside, the plane would become invisible. Making a plane two sided in a 3D application is
equivalent to adding another plane on top of the first but rotated by 180 degrees so the normals
Chapter – 80 3D Nodes 1746