Materials

The material shaders dgs_material and dielectric_material implement different physically based models of reflection and refraction.

Diffuse-glossy-specular Material

The dgs_material material shader can simulate mirrors, glossy paint or plastic, anisotropic glossy materials such as brushed metal, diffuse materials such as paper, translucent materials such as frosted glass, and any combination of these. This shader cannot be used as a shadow shader because shadows can only be computed along straight light rays, which does not agree with the definition of DGS materials. Use global illumination to illuminate objects in partial shadow from DGS objects.

dgs_material

    color "dgs_material" (
        color           "diffuse",
        color           "glossy",
        color           "specular",
        scalar          "shiny",
        scalar          "shiny_u",
        scalar          "shiny_v",
        scalar          "transp",
        scalar          "ior",
        array light     "lights"
        integer         "mode")

diffuse: is added to the result for each light, after multiplication with the color returned by the light and a weight based on the dot product of the incident light direction and the light direction.
glossy: provides the color of glossy highlights.
specular: provides the color of mirror reflections.
shiny: determines the width of the isotropic glossy reflection, in a manner similar to the Phong reflection exponent: 5 is very wide and 100 is very narrow. If shiny is nonzero, the following five anisotropic parameters are ignored.
shiny_u shiny_v: are used for anisotropic glossy reflection. The specify the width of the glossy reflection is in the first derivative U and V directions. (Derivatives must be enabled or specified on the polygons or free-form surfaces that this shader is applied to.) The regular shiny parameter must be undefined or set to 0.
transp: specifies transparency (if ior is 1) or refractivity (if ior is not 1). It also indirectly specifies reflectivity, as 1 - transp. Specular transmission is the same as refraction, while glossy and diffuse transmission is known as translucency.
ior: is the index of refraction of the material. Metals typically have higher index of refraction than glass.
lights: is a list of light instances used for light lists.
mode: controls which lights to use, see light lists.

For isotropic reflection, use the shiny parameter and leave the shiny_u and shiny_v parameters undefined. If the shiny parameter is undefined or zero, the shader will check whether shiny_u and shiny_v are defined and nonzero, and if so, compute anisotropic reflection. The surface U direction is used as the anisotropic brushing direction.

Dielectric Material

The dielectric_material shader is a physically based material shader which can be used to simulate dielectric media such as glass, water, and other liquids. The shader uses Fresnel's formulas for dielectric interfaces. This means that most light is transmitted through the surface for perpendicular incident directions while most light is reflected by the surface for grazing incident angles, simulating the behavior of real dielectric materials. The shader also uses Beer's law for absorption of light that passes through a medium. This means that the light is subject to an exponential falloff as it is transmitted between two surfaces with dielectric material.

Two types of dielectric interfaces are supported: dielectric-air simulates the interface between a dielectric material and air, such as glass-air, and dielectric-dielectric simulates the interface between two dielectric materials, such as glass-water.

Two achieve physically correct simulations it is important to use the correct surface interfaces. When modeling a glass of cognac three different interfaces are required: glass-air, glass-cognac, and cognac-air. The dielectric material uses the normals of the surface to distinguish the media on either side of the interface. For a dielectric-air interface the normals point into the air. For a dielectric-dielectric interface the normal point into a dielectric material which is "outside". To use the dielectric material the model normals must be oriented correctly unless the ignore_normals parameter is set to true. This shader cannot be used as a shadow shader.

dielectric_material

    color "dielectric_material" (
        color           "col",
        scalar          "ior",
        color           "col_out",
        scalar          "ior_out",
        boolean         "ignore_normals"
        scalar          "phong_coef",
        array lights    "lights",
        integer         "mode")

col: is the "persistence" coefficient which corresponds to the fraction of light which is left after traversing one unit of material. Thus 0.9 means that 10% of the light is absorbed per unit length of the material. Lengths are measured in world coordinates.
ior: is the index of refraction of the dielectric material.
col_out: if specified, the material is a dielectric-dielectric interface and col_out is the persistence coefficient of the outside dielectric material.
ior_out: is used in combination with col_out to describe the outside dielectric material.
ignore_normals: : normally the decision whether a ray enters or leaves the object is based on the direction of the normal (towards or away from the incident ray). If the object is poorly modeled and the normals cannot be trusted, this flag can be set to make the dielectric material shader count the number of times the ray has entered and left the object before instead of relying on the normal direction.
pcoef: is a phong coefficient used to compute normalized phong highlights which again is used to generate a fake impression of an area light source. If this component is zero there will be no fake highlights and only the reflected rays can create highlight effects if they hit something bright.
lights: is a list of light instances used for light lists.
mode: controls which lights to use, see light lists.

Path Material

The path_material shader implements path raytracing. On contrary to the distributed raytracing, for each ray hit, at most one ray is reflected or refracted when path raytracing is used. With sufficiently large trace depth limits, most of the indirect illumination effects are computed correctly. However, the results are very noisy and an extremely high number of samples is required for obtaining high quality images.

Note that finalgather and globillum settings have no effect on the surfaces with path_material: the diffuse indirect illumination component is computed by reflecting at most one ray according to a Lambertian-distributed direction. There is no path_material_photon shader. For rendering speedup, finalgather and photon emission should be disabled. Higher trace depth setting than in the scenes using photons may be required.

path_material

    color "path_material" (
        color           "diffuse",
        color           "glossy",
        color           "specular",
        scalar          "shiny",
        scalar          "shiny_u",
        scalar          "shiny_v",
        scalar          "transp",
        scalar          "ior",
        array light     "lights",
        integer         "mode")

The parameters and where meanings are identical to those of the dgs_material shader.