Material

Panels for matrial setting is shown in property panel by clicking material icon.

Material setting determines the color, texture and shader of the objects.

Link

You may want to use the same material setting for several objects. If link is set, the object uses material setting of the linked object instead of its own one.

Coloring

Ambient

Ambient color is an approximated way to model the effect of light reflected by other object. Light is assumed being scattered everywhere equally, and the face in shadow is colored by ambient color.

Diffuse

Diffuse color controls the color that come from diffuse refrection of light thta comes from light source directly.

Specular

Specular light controls highlights of smoothe face. Specular depends on relative direction of light and view and the normal of face.

Sphere with blue ambiend, red diffuse, and green specular. Note that diffuse and specular effects are added to base ambient color.

Alpha

Alpha controls transparency of object. alpha 0 means utterly transparent object, while alpha 1 means no transparency. Usually, light from behind must be given at first to calculate the effect of semi-transparent object. This requires z-sort of objects in drawing process, with cost in performance, and the cost can be high in some cases.
Note that a user-given configuration of z-sorting is needed in some cases.

Shine(Shininess)

Smooth objects have small and bright highlights, while rough surface objects have large and dim highlight.
Shininess parameter determine the spottiness of highlighted area.

Texture

Primitive object can have texture.

TexturePath

File path of texture. Currently, png, jpg, tiff, tga, and bmp format can be read.

Offset/Image sequence

When image file can be interpolated as image sequence (for example, Image0000.png), the image corresponding to current frame would be used. Offset value is used to shift the index. When image sequence is unchecked, the image would be used as a single image.

Mapping

The way the texture would be mapped. "UV" is a way commonly used in respective primitive shape. (thera-phi mapping for sphere, for example.)

Interpolate

The way texture would be interpolated.
A nearest interpolated texture shows texture pattern cleary (but jaggy can be a problem in this way), while a linear interpolated texture shows more smoothly (but with blured impression).

There are three types of behavior at the edge of texture.
Followings are samples of "Clamp at Edge", "Repeat" and "Clamp" respectively.

Note that "Clamp" is not so obvious way. In "Clamp" case, the region outside of the texture is treated as if it is transparent one.

Shader

Shader determines the way faces are colored according to lighting and geometry. Following predefined shaders exist.

Classic	The way classical OpenGL works. (i.e. default pipeline without any shader)
Gouraud	Color is evaluated at each vertex and interpolated between them
Phong	Geometry is interpolated between vertices, and then color is evaluated at each surface point. Better than Gouraud.
Toon	Object is expressed with very limted number of color.
Normal	Normal vector of surface (in viewing coordinate) is converted to color RGB.

Sample of predefined shaders in order shown in the above table.

Flat

In some shaders, flat shading is implemented. Normal vector is not interpolated between vertices, and polygon shape appears clearly.

Threshold/Border

In toon shaing, simple edge detection and outline render is implemented.
This option determine the edge width.

Dissolve

In "full" dissolve mode, semi-transparent object is drawn stocastically pixel-by-pixel.
Combining this effect with ensemble-averaged rendering, stocastic transparency method can be used.

In "Not-full" dissolve mode, only very low alpha polygons are drawn with dissolve effect.
This mode is implemented to prevent Mach-band to some degree in the case with drawing many low alpha polygons.

Option

Culling

When culling is checked, backside of the polygon would be hidden. (Well made polygon models have information which side is front and which side is back. Some polygon models may have broken info, if ill-made.)
Usually, this option have no effect on the render image, but in some special way of rendering, controlling culling may be important.

Semi-transparent sphere without culling. Since the order of drawing polygons in a single object is not Z-sorted, the image is broken. (In some part, near side polygon is drawn faster than far side polygon).

Additive

In normal process for rendering, object hide the background color and then draw its color. (If the object is semi-transparent, background color is hidden by a part). If additive is checked, background color is conserved and the color of object would be just added.

This effect may be good for shining object. Oftenly used for shining particles like stars.

Depth Mask

In normal process for rendering, depth information is drawn in depth-buffer, and that buffer is used to compare whether the newly drawing polygon is near the camera than previously drawn polygon or should be hidden.
When this checkbox is not checked, drawing in depth buffer is skipped. This option may be useful in some special way of rendering.

Wire Frame

Show object as wireframe. Note that N-gons are converted to multiple triangles in Zindaiji 4.

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