Material room basics; Poser Surface, and the making of a gold procedural texture.

DIFFUSE_COLOR - the base colour of the material zone.With the diffuse colour you can change the colour of the materialzone as well as add an image texture map or other node to completelytexture the zone.

~Lets make some gold, in the DIFFUSE_COLOR colour picker lets choose a nice deep brown.

DIFFUSE_VALUE - the value of the DIFFUSE_COLOR0.000 is no diffuse color applied, rendering the material zoneblack 1.000 is full strength, basically what this is representing is how 'far' from black we want our base colour.

~For our gold we will leave this at the default 1.000000.SPECULAR_COLOR - the colour of the highlight.

~When the lights in your scene shine on an object it creates the specular highlights if you would like to have something other then white (like in the metal gold for example where the diffuse is a brown and the highlight is a yellow colour) you can change that value here.

SPECULAR_VALUE - this changes the vibrancy of the highlight.A lower value lessens the vibrancy, a higher value the opposite.HIGHLIGHT_SIZE - the size of the highlight can be changed with thisvalue.

~Smaller number smaller highlight. Continuing with the gold example,a small value for the highlight would not give us a convincing goldmaterial, where as a high value, greater then 1.000 would give us a nice big highlight to work with.

AMBIENT_COLOR - a simulated colour that surrounds the material.

~We will leave this value as is.

AMBIENT_VALUE - how much ambient colour is applied to the material zone.

TRANSPARENCY - The amount of opacity available to the material zone.

~A lower value makes your material zone opaque to 1.000 which is totally see through and therefore invisible. A liquid like cola, would have a higher opacity where as glass would have an opacity ofalmost 0.000, but since gold is not see through we will not change this parameter.

TRANSPARENCY_EDGE - this affects the transparency around the edge of the material zone. As mentioned in the manual, a glass is less transparent around the curve and base then in the face. This parameter can achieve the same results.

TRANSPARENCY_FALLOFF - this is the rate at which the transparency becomes more opaque as it nears the edge of your material zone.

TRANSLUCENCE_COLOR - this is the colour of the light passing through the material zone.

~Again since gold isn’t see through we do not to worry about translucence of the object.

TRANSLUCENCE_VALUE - the lower the value the lower the strength of the translucent colour.

REFLECTION_COLOR - the base colour that is reflected off the material zone.For use with the reflect node available in the lighting menu.

~To continue on with the gold we have been working click on the REFLECTION_COLOR plug choose new node, and navigate to Lighting >Ray Trace > and click on reflect.This will add the reflect node to the Reflection_Color parameter, allowing the gold to reflect it’s surroundings. Lets give our gold something to reflect. Click on the colour picker and change the black to a pure white, and then click on the colour plug and navigate to the 2d Textures, and choose Image Map,in the image map node choose browse and navigate the browser to the Poser 6 Materials, and choosethe light nodes folder and load in the officedesk.jpg.

REFLECTION_VALUE - the lower the value the lower the strength of the reflective colour.
We will leave this at 1, though I am sure that gold is not as reflective as say a mirror, but the differenceI have found are negligible.

REFRACTION_COLOR - the base refracted colour of the material zone.For use with the refract node in the lighting menu. Light doesn't pass through gold so we will cover more on this in a later article.

REFRACTION_VALUE - the lower the value the lower the strength of the refracted colour.

BUMP - used with a bump texture map, the lower the value the smaller the bumps.

DISPLACEMENT - used with a texture map this attribute can define surface details that the lesser bump map cannot.

~We can add a light displacement to the gold but only if you want it bumpy, this is done the same way as we added our reflection image, by navigating to the 2D Textures and choosing an image map to use.
~I have chosen alternately to add a clouds 3D Texture, with these settings
Sky_Color=Black
Cloud_Color=White
Scale=0.299999
Complexity=1.600003
Bottom=0.200000
Bias=0.880000
Gain=0.600000
Global_Coordinates = NoNoise_Type=Original

~We are now ready to render out our gold, but 1st I like to save it to my Poser Material Room Library so I do not have to make it again, so do that by clicking on the ‘+’ sign at the bottom of the library, name it something memorable and hit OK.

ALTERNATE_DIFFUSE - for use with a few selected nodes (velvet, hair etc)

ALTERNATE_SPECULAR - for use with a few selected nodes (blinn, glossy etc) This node will let you define the shape of the specular highlight.

REFLECTION_LITE_MULT - this multiplies the colour of light hitting the surface. It darkens reflections and is on by default.

REFLECTION_KD_MULT - this will apply the DIFFUSE_COLOR as a tint to the REFLECTION_COLOR

~The rest of the Poser Surface Parameters are not going tobe used but they are still worth mentioning in our on going quest to understand this powerful aspect of Poser.

GRADIENT_BUMP - Backward compatible bump map for use with .bum file format.The .bum format is available for use with Poser 4.

SHADOW_CATCH_ONLY - this allows 100% transparent materials to catch shadows.It will treat transparent surfaces as opaque where the shadow falls from another object.

TOONID - when using the toon outline renderer, this will allow you to choose which material zones get the black toon outline, you can set each to a different ID and have everything with it's own outline or give several the same ID and have them share an outline.