Materials & Textures

The set materials created in your DCC will appear in Animotive’s Materials & Textures tab. This feature allows you to configure elements of your set’s materials and connect image textures to them.

The different sections of the material attributes are explained below;

Shader:

The available types of shader is Lit, Unlit or Toon. A Lit shader will take into consideration all of the active scene lights while Unlit will be a flat shaded material not affected by any lights in the scene. Selecting Toon will enable Animotive’s Toon shader allowing you to curate a more cartoonish look.

Surface Options:

• Workflow Mode "Metallic Workflow" and "Specular Workflow" refer to different approaches in handling the reflection properties of materials

• Surface Type “Opaque” refers to a mesh that doesn’t require any transparency while “Transparent” can be used if transparency is required, for example with a hair texture.

• Render Face This determines what side of your mesh is computed for rendering, “Front”, “Back” or “Both”

• Alpha Cliping creates a transparent effect with hard edges by using a threshold whereby any pixels with an alpha value under that threshold do not get rendered

• Receive Shadows enables shadows to be received on the mesh

When Toon shader is selected you will see the following options appear under Surface Options.

• Shading Color tints the base colour of your material

• Shade Texture allows you to apply an image texture to use as your shading color.

• Toon Shade Factor increases or decreases the value of the toon shader value

Surface Inputs:

This is the section where you can connect your image maps. Do this by clicking on the chequered icon next to the map you want to connect.

Detail inputs:

The Base Map and Detail Normal Map in this section allow you to add another layer of textures on top of the main textures. Usually, these are smaller and repeated more times across the object's surface compared to the main maps. This helps to have sharp details when you look closely, but still maintains good detail when viewed from a distance.

A Detail Mask lets you choose where the detail texture shows up on your model. You can decide to have the detail in some areas and not in others. For example, you might not want extra detail in a brick texture.

Advanced options:

Environment Reflections and Specular Highlights are enabled by default. To turn them off, just click the box beside the attribute.