A material describes the surface properties of an object. Materials are created in the MATERIALS Tab of ShapeShifter 3D, using the NEW button. Each material has different properties that describe its colors and how it reacts to lights. ShapeShifter 3D materials have the same property names available to Director 8.5 shaders. Please consult Director 8.5 help for more information about each material property. The properties you can define in ShapeShifter 3D are:

Ambient: Controls how much ambient light is reflected by the material.

Diffuse: The default color of the object. It is blended with a texture if one is assigned.

Emissive: Adds light to the material independently of scene lighting.

Specular: Controls the color of the highlights. Only effective when the shininess property is greater than 0.

Shininess: Controls the percentage of the surface devoted to highlight. A value of 0 disables specular highlights. Low values (greater than zero) produce large highlight areas, while higher values reduce the highlight. Due to differences in OpenGL the preview of shininess values in ShapeShifter 3D does not match Director 8.5 in all cases, but the numerical value of shininess is exported correctly.

Blend: Controls the transparency level of the object.

Texture: The name of an external image file to be used as a texture for this material. Textures are applied according to the texture coordinates of each group (see the Editing Texture Coordinates section of the docs for more information on this.)

Once a material is defined it can be assigned to a geometry group. This is done in the GROUPS Tab. Select a group from the groups list. Click the ASSIGN MATERIAL button. A list with all available materials will appear. Select a material name and click OK. The 3D view will show the selected group with the updated material applied.

Important Tip: Almost all 3D accelerator cards requires textures with dimensions that are a power of 2 (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.) If you use textures that do not have these dimensions they will most likely be scaled by Director 8.5 at runtime to fit these dimensions, thus creating undesirable artifacts. ShapeShifter 3D will scale your textures for preview to a power of 2, but it will not force scaling of textures when exporting to Shockwave 3D. We recommend that you always use dimensions that are square and are a power of 2 (256X256 pixels for example) if you want to get the best possible image quality for your textures. Also, wherever possible use smaller images (128X128, 64X64) over that of larger ones (256X256, 512X512) to increase performance in Director.