Designing Materials

These topics are an overview of using the material editor used to design materials. The material editor gives you a huge number of options for material design. It also has a large number of controls. 

Material Components

Material is made up of the following components: 

1. Colors ( Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, Emissive )
2. Textures ( 0 - 7, total 8 layers )
3. Shader Text ( D3D Effect Code )
4. Texture Play ( a serial textures that apply to layer 0 in turn )
5. Other ( Specular Enable, Shade Mode, etc )

Workflow

1. Create a new material
Click the "New" button in the Material Panel. A material having a default value of silver gray will appear. You can rename it in the edit box under the preview window.

2. Set colors and shine
A surface usually reflects many colors. Awakening's materials use a four-color model to simulate this:
        Ambient is the color of the object in shadow.
        Diffuse is the color of the object in direct lighting.
        Specular is the color of shiny highlights.
        Emissive is the color of self-luminous.
        Power control how sharp the specular effects are.

Note: material colors only work on Mobiles by default, because only mobiles support real-time lighting in Awakeing. But if you want, you can turn on real-time lighting by using Shader Text for other 3d objects.

3. Set textures
Click the square buttons in the Textures group of the Material Panel, the texture browse window will pop up. By selecting in the browse window, you can assign a texture for every texture layer.

4. Write Shader Text
In "D3D Effect" group, you can press the first button that is under the group title to load shader text from an existing shader file. You can find shader files under the "effects" folder in the Awakening install folder. You can also write shader codes from scratch, then press the Save button to save and activate the shader codes.

5. Add Texture Play
Click the "Texture Play" group button, the Texture Play Dialog will pop up. You can select a list using the dialog.

6. Assign to objects
Select some objects in the scene (like mobile, billboard, etc); then select a material in Material Panel, press the Assign button, Only Mobile, Surface, Effect, Static Mesh  have materials.