Material Properties Window

Use

You can view and modify material properties using the Material Properties window.

Features

Material properties describe how polygons reflect light, or appear to emit light, in a 3D scene. Essentially, a material is a set of properties that provide various information about the polygons being rendered including:

• How they reflect ambient and diffuse light.

• What their specular highlights look like.

• Whether the polygons appear to emit light.

Material properties detail a material's diffuse reflection, ambient reflection, light emission, specular highlight characteristics, glossiness etc. Material properties affect the colors that are used. With the exception of the specular property, each property is described as an RGBA color that represents how much of the red, green, and blue parts of a given type of light it reflects, and an alpha blending factor - the alpha component of the RGBA color.

Where the Edit Keyframes button is displayed beside an option, keyframe editing is available for the property.

Activities

To open the Material Properties window, do one of the following:

• Double-click a material in the Materials (Scene) panel.

• Right-click a material in the Materials (Scene) panel, and select Material Properties.

• Open the Object Properties window for an object that is associated with the material, click the Materials tab, select the material in the used materials list, and then click Material Properties.