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Table of Contents
1 Diffuse Color & reflected Light ........................................................... 3
2 Specular is reflection ! ....................................................................... 4
3 Material & Layer selection Menu ....................................................... 5
4 Layered Material & Weight ................................................................ 6
5 Sub Layers ........................................................................................ 7
6 Layer Weight organization ................................................................ 8
7 3 different ways to create an apparently correct plastic material ...... 9
8 Fresnel Reflection ........................................................................... 10
9 Fresnel Reflection & IOR ................................................................. 11
10 Automatic Energy conservation ....................................................... 12
11 Get Material Instance ....................................................................... 13
12 Core Feature .................................................................................... 14
13 Ambient ............................................................................................ 14
14 Diffuse .............................................................................................. 15
15 Specular Reflection .......................................................................... 15
16 Specular Shininess .......................................................................... 16
17 Reflection ......................................................................................... 16
18 Refraction ......................................................................................... 17
19 Translucency .................................................................................... 17
20 Transmittance .................................................................................. 19
21 Transmittance Shininess ................................................................. 19
22 Self Luminance ................................................................................ 20
23 Absorption ........................................................................................ 21
24 Anisotropcio reflection ...................................................................... 21
25 Dielectric Glass ................................................................................ 22
26 Thin Glass ........................................................................................ 22
27 Wireframe ......................................................................................... 23
28 Bitmap .............................................................................................. 24
29 Bitmap Coordinates Panel ............................................................... 25
30 Normal Ramp ................................................................................... 25
31 Fresnel Ramp .................................................................................. 26
32 Partial coverage ............................................................................... 28
33 Diffuse/Specular Map ....................................................................... 29
34 Mask ................................................................................................. 30
35 Metals ............................................................................................... 32
36 Sub Surface Scattering ..................................................................... 35

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Materials are a very important part of a rendered image and can make the difference between a photo
realistic looking image and an artificial looking one. Kerkythea provides a powerful Material Editor
System that allows an extreme control over the final aspect of the created material. Kerkythea material
properties are based on physical laws and therefore are very accurate. Before we can build one we need to
know some aspects of physical laws to understand better how we can create our own materials, so lets
have a look at the following image.
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As you can see all light is absorbed and reflected light. Understanding this is a very important part to be
able to create accurate materials. If you have some experience with other render engines, you will have to
relearn some concepts that are widely accepted but not physically accurate at all. One common mistake is
the distinction between specular and reflection. Both represent the same physical property of a material,
light being reflected in a specular way. So why does this distinction between specular and reflection
exist? The answer is that most 3D programs are realized for animation rendering and therefore physical
accuracy are exchanged for rendering speed. One second of an animation represents at least 25 images
and the cost in render time for accurate specular reflection is too high, therefore specular reflections are
faked in these kind of render engines (typically a scan line render) meaning that in the best case, only the
light source is being sampled. If you have a look at the next image, you can see that both spheres 1 and 2
look very similar but when you turn specular sampling on in Kerkythea, you can see the difference. So
why is this important? It is important because of a physical Law called Energy Conservation. As the first
image explained that all light is reflected light, this means that the diffuse color is reflected light and the
specular color is also reflected light. An object can only reflect the light it receives, thereforewe have to
make sure that our diffuse color and specular color dont exceed the amount of light it receives, meaning
that both diffuse and specular have to be in the 1.000 intensity limit!
If not, we are creating a material that reflects more light then it receives and this is not physically
accurate. The common mistake is to set the specular color to a high intensity value because you could do
that in a scan line render without any problem but with Kerkythea, specular is rendered accurately as
reflection and thereforeyou have to be sure to set a proper value that doesnt violate the Energy
Conservation Law. The same rule has to be used with transparent or semi-transparent materials because
the light that passes through an object cannot also be reflecting from it at the same time.
Kerkythea allows you to turn specular sampling on or off depending if you want to fake
a material property or not. Turning specular sampling off will speed up render time but be aware that this
can only be used with the Photon Map & Final Gathering render method (or any other Biased Method).
Kerkythea will automatically turn specular sampling on when you choose an unbiased render method
like Path tracing, Bidirectional Path tracing or Metropolis Light Transport.
There is another important physical Law called Fresnel Reflection (Fresnel effect) but I am going to talk
about this later. Now it is time to learn something about the powerful Material Layer System of
Kerkythea. A good way to perceive the Material system of Kerkythea is to think of it like combining
different material properties to create our final
Material and in this task, the Layer system is our friend. Lets see the options we get by right clicking on
the Material name
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As you can see we have a lot of options we can choose from. Set Layered Material andFill Weights
will be one of the options we are going to use most of the time besides the selection of the Material
Shaders. You may wonder what Fill Weights is Here is a good moment to explain that in Kerkythea
there is a separation between the Material Panel where we assign the color to our material components
and the Layer Panel where we assign the weight of each material component that will contribute to the
final material. This means that when you give a diffuse color to your material or a specular color, the
intensity of the colors dont correspond to the exact value you can read on the intensity value. For
example if you give a value = 0.800 to the specular color in the Material property panel, this value does
not mean that your adding 80% reflection strength to the material!
The % of each material element we have assigned to a material is controlled in the Layer panel and its
called Weights. If you give an intensity of 0.800 in the Layer Panel, it will correspond to 80%. Lets
create our first Layered Material and fill it with Weights.
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By filling the Layer with Weight, Kerkythea will assign a weight channel for each Material Component
we have added. Each weight channel has a number that corresponds to the number of the Material
Component. We can also build more sophisticated materials by using Sub-layers
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Now we need to know how Kerkythea handles the weight for each material component and sub Layer
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We are ready to create our first material. I will show you how to build a basic plastic material because
plastic shares 99% of the physical behavior of most common materials, meaning that if you want to
create a varnished wood material or leather, you would need to follow the same steps like you do when
creating a plastic material. I will show you 3 different ways to create an apparently correct plastic
material. The first two ways of creating a plastic material are very common in other render engines and
maybe you are used to doing them this way. The third one uses the Procedural Fresnel shader and I will
explain it in depth later.
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Material 1 uses a Matte/Phong Diffuse element and the reflection from the Dielectric Glass shader with an
IOR (Index of Refraction) = 3.00 and Fresnel turned on. The weights for each element are 0.800 (80%)
for Diffuse and 0.200 (20%) for reflection.
Material 2 uses the same Matte / Phong Diffuse element and the reflection from the Matte/Phong shader.
Here we dont use IOR and dont use Fresnel. The weights are for Diffuse = 0.900 (90%) and for
Reflection = 0.100 (10%)
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Material 3 uses the same components as Material 2 but the weight channel uses the Procedural Fresnel
shader instead of the color intensity. Just follow the steps in the image and copy the values for the
procedural Fresnel shader (you can access Procedural Fresnel by clicking on the Procedural thumbnail
window)
Apparently all 3 Materials should give an accurate plastic material because none of them is violating the
energy conservation Law. But this is not the case because of a physical Law called Fresnel effect. Lets
compare these 3 Materials and see how Fresnel works...
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Looking at the materials applied on a spherical shape we dont see so much difference but applying it to a
box shaped object, the difference between Material 3 and the other two (material 1 and 2) are evident.
What is going on? Why does material 1 with an IOR = 3.00 AND Fresnel enabled show a different
effect? The answer is because of the way Fresnel works. As I explained in the image above, Fresnel is
governed by the IOR value meaning that by increasing the IOR value, we increase the reflection at the 0
degree viewing angle and Fresnel calculates the reflection distribution on the object. At 90 degree
viewing angle reflection is always 100%. This means that the Procedural Fresnel shader is calculating a
gradient from 0 degree viewing angle to 100% reflectivity at 90 degree viewing angle depending on the
IOR value we have set. Every Material has its own IOR (Index of Refraction) value and you can find
accurate indices for the material you want to build in Optical Reference Tables. Probably you have heard
of IOR for Glass and transparent objects but these values are also for non-transparent objects. In the next
Image you can see how IOR affects the reflection by increasing its value.
Now back again to our question, why does material 1 with an IOR of 3.00 not show the Fresnel effect. If
we look at the Material components, we see that we have used the reflection of the dielectric shader with
reflection intensity = 1.000. Until here everything is correct. We can look at the Fresnel & IOR image and
see how the Fresnel reflection with IOR = 3.00 would look. But now we have to accomplish the energy
conservation Law and so we have to give the reflection component a weight according to the weight we
have given to the diffuse component. In this case I have chosen 0.800 for diffuse and 0.200 for the
reflection (0.800 + 0.200 = 1.000) energy conservation is correct. But Fresnel Law says that at a 90-
degree viewing angle, reflection is 100%. Our reflection component can not accomplish this Law because
we have given it a weight of 0.200 to accomplish the energy conservation Law, meaning that at the end
our reflection component will only reflect 20% at 90 degree viewing angle (weight = 0.200 is equal 20%
reflection max). Material 2 does not use Fresnel but the problem is the same, we have given a weight =
0.100 for reflection and 0.900 for diffuse, meaning that our reflection component will only reflect 10%
max. It looks like there is no way to accomplish both Laws at the same time. If we want to have accurate
Fresnel reflection, we would need to set the weight to 1.000 (100%) but then we violate the energy
conservation Law because any diffuse component we add to the reflection would increase the total
reflection to more the 100%. The solution for our problem is the Procedural Fresnel shader that can
accomplish both Laws at the same time...
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Here I created a white plastic material to demonstrate the accuracy and easy use of the Procedural Fresnel
solution. The Procedural Fresnel shader works exactly the same way as the Fresnel in the Material Panel
but with the advantage that we can have more control over it when needed. This would be the basic
plastic material setup and the important part here is that the Procedural Fresnel for the Diffuse Color
Weight has to have the Low and High Color inverted (this is very important). By changing the IOR
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values in both weight channels we can change the reflection strength without having to make any other
changes. Notice how by increasing the IOR value, the diffuse color gets less visible until it disappears
completely. This is predicted by physical lLaws because the more reflective an object is, the less it shows
its own diffuse color. Another advantage is that we dont have to care about our diffuse color and
specular color in the Material panel, because both can be at 1.000 because the Procedural Fresnel is taking
care of the energy conservation and Fresnel Law. Even more, the specular color must always be set to
1.000 intensity! Now that we have created our basic plastic material, adjusting it for our needs is very
easy because we only have to give it the appropriate diffuse color and adjust the shininess value to make
the reflection more blurry or more crisp, adding a bump map to it if needed and thats it. The main
difference in Kerkythea is that we are creating Materials, meaning that once we create a plastic material,
we dont have to do it again, it will work with any diffuse color or bitmap we give to it without having to
change any IOR value or specular color strength intensity! As I mentioned before every material has its
own IOR value that can be found in optical tables on the internet. Common plastic has an IOR around
1.46 (depending on the type of plastic, the IOR can change from 1.46 until 1.66 more or less) but for a
ceramic material, an IOR = 1.51 would be more appropriate.
You may think that this material setup can be time consuming if you want to create a more sophisticated
Layered material with Sub-layers. Not at all, in Kerkythea we have the possibility to add materials that
we have saved in our Material library to our Layer tree. Have a look at the next image that explains how
to do it.
We have covered an important part of material creation and I hope you could follow all my explanations
and see how important energy conservation and Fresnel reflection are.
Accurate Fresnel reflection is one of these things that will contribute to a more realistic looking material
and as the Fresnel effect is more visible on Box shaped objects, you will see the difference in your
renders immediately (just think of all the objects that we have around us everyday, most of them are box
shaped objects . Walls, Floors, Furnitures .etc.). It is important that we take a close look at the
objects around us and see for how the Fresnel effect shows up on those objects (reality is always our best
judge!)
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Lets have a look at the Material shaders and the components Kerkythea offers to build our materials.
Before we start getting into details, I want to show one of the Core Features of Kerkythea
Kerkythea lets you use a Color, Bitmap or Procedural shader for nearly all shader elements and also for
the Layered Weight Channels. You can even use them together at the same time but remember that they
should not sum more than 1.000 together. Laterwe will see how we can use them to enhance our
materials. The words shader and material are used interchangeably throughout this tutorial.
Ambient color is an old feature that survives from the days of scan line renders.
The original need for it was to simulate ambient light coming from the sky or indirect light in an indoor
scene. With Kerkythea we dont need to fake ambient light because we have physically accurate GI render
methods but for those who want to use the plain ray tracer without GI, it can come in handy. Before you
can use it, you have to enable
Ambient Light from the tool bar > Settings > Scene settings > Global Settings
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Diffuse color is the shader component that gives the color to our material. Apart from the color of the
object, you can use it for very diffuse materials like walls or any material that doesnt show a specular
component.
Specular color is the component that gives the specular reflection part of the material.
If you want to use it in combination with Procedural Fresnel in the Layer weight, the intensity must be set
to 1.000.
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Shininess represents the microscopic surface property of the material. Increasing this value will make the
material surface smoother and the reflection more sharp and mirror- like. Reducing the value will do the
opposite and make the microscopic surface more rough and therefore the reflection will be more blurry. A
value of 50 000.000 will produce a perfect mirror. The quality of the specular shininess sampling is
controlled with the Fuzzy Tracing value located in the render panel. Medium or High will give acceptable
results most of the time. You can select an attenuation like Cosine, Fresnel or None for the specular
reflection. If you want to use Fresnel, the specular color has to be at 1.000 otherwise Fresnel cannot work
accurately and you will have to use an IOR value greater then 1.000 to get any reflection. If you are going
to use Procedural Fresnel in the Layered weight, then you have to select none for attenuation because
Procedural Fresnel already uses Fresnel attenuation and we dont want to use Fresnel twice.
Reflection in Kerkythea represents a perfect mirror like smooth reflection and should be used if you are
looking for a very smooth surface that reflects perfectly because it renders much quicker than using the
specular color with a high shininess value
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Refraction is used for transparent materials and works with IOR. An IOR value = 1.000
will make the object invisible (can be used as an alternative clip map). An IOR value = 1.52 is for
common glass.
Translucency is for translucent materials and represents a sub surface scattering behavior of a material.
Depending on the size of the object, render time can be very long when using it with Photon Mapping and
Final Gathering, therefore Kerkythea offers also a pseudo translucency alternative that renders very
quickly with acceptable results. Translucency can be mapped (using Bitmap) and also work with
Procedural shaders. Translucency and pseudo Translucency are turned off by default and have to be
enabled in the advanced settings. For Translucency you have to go to Advanced Settings and under Ray
Tracer > Standard Ray Tracer > Sample Criteria, turn on Translucency. For Pseudo Translucency you
have to go to Advanced Settings > Direct Light Estimators > Refraction Enhanced and enable Pseudo
Translucency. Translucency works with Diffuse color and therefore you have to use them together. You
dont have to worry about energy conservation because Kerkythea handles that for you and both can be
used together as one material component. Later we will see how we can create materials that present sub
surf scattering behavior. Translucency can also be used on single face objects like paper or leaves, have a
look at the following image
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Transmittance is also for transparent objects but the difference with the refraction component, it produces
blurry refraction for Frosted Glass or other blurry transparent objects. Like the refraction component, it
also works with IOR values.
Transmittance Shininess represents the blurry amount of the Transmittance component. Lower values will
make the object more blurry and higher values less blurry until it is perfectly transparent. Notice that if
you set a very low value for transmittance, the material will start to scatter the light in all directions and
therefore you can also use it as a scatter element for your material creation. Fresnel attenuation is the one
to use for most common materials. The sampling quality is controlled with the Fuzzy tracing parameter
located on the render panel.
These are all the components of the Matte / Phong shader; lets have a look at some other components
located in the advanced panel of the Material Editor
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With the Self Luminance property, we can convert our object into an Emitter (light) by enabling the
Emitter option and giving it a color value greater than 0.000. You can also indicate in which direction the
Emitter should emit the light by enabling Front and/or Back option. To obtain a power for your emitter
greater than 1, you will need to type the number in manually. If your render takes too long with Photon
Map and Final Gathering renders method, one problem could be that you have given a self luminance
value to a dense polygon object. Every triangle face of an Emitter object will be considered as one Light
Emitter by Kerkythea, meaning that every light will shoot the amount of Photons you have set in the
Global Illumination panel! If the Emitter object is a dense mesh, you could even run out of memory when
rendering with Photon Map & Final Gathering render method. With unbiased render methods like Path
tracing, Bidirectional Path tracing and MLT, these problems are not presented but even there it is good
practice to keep the amount of polygons of your emitter objects low. Here you can see how Kerkythea
handles imported geometry.
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Absorption is another important feature and represents the behavior of light passing through an object. For
example, if you look at water in a swimming pool you can see the bottom of the swimming pool but when
you look at sea or ocean water; you may or may not see the bottom. This is because when light passes
through an object, it will get absorbed and loose intensity and it depends on the object property how fast the
light will loose its intensity. Notice that the color you give to absorption will be the color that will get
absorbed meaning that you will actually see the opposite color in your material. You will need to use
absorption for accurate colored Glass and also for sub-surface scattering (a.k.a. sss). A good way to look at
absorption is to see it as the density parameter of an object. The difference between a transparent and a solid
non-transparent object is the absorption factor.
The Anisotropic (Ashikhmin) shader is very useful for metals and other material that show anisotropic
reflection. The difference between the Matte / Phong specular shininess and the anisotropic shininess is that
you can control the shape of the reflection in the X and Y direction. You have to enable specular sampling to
get accurate specular reflection. The sample quality is controlled with the Fuzzy Tracing Variable in the
render panel (be aware that this shader needs higher fuzzy tracing quality settings than the Matt / Phong
shader). The shininess value for perfect reflection is 100 000.00 (the double of the Matte/Phong specular
shininess) but normally a value of 10 000.000 is more realistic. (Your model needs UV coordinates for anisotropic reflections)
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Use the Dielectric Glass shader whenever you need accurate glass or other transparent materials like
water, plastic, diamand .etc. To work accurately, your model needs to have thickness meaning that for
a single face object, the dielectric Glass shader can not calculate accurate IOR values. You can find
accurate dispersion values (Abe) on Optical tables.
The Thin Glass shader is a special shader that represents what the name suggest thin glass (a.k. AGS). It
dos not bend the light and therefore it will not produce caustics but render time is much faster. The IOR
value will only change the reflection intensity of the glass. This shader works well on single faced objects.
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The Wireframe Procedural shader is one of the many Procedural shaders Kerkythea has to offer. Have a
look at the image to see what the different settings do. The thickness
of the wire is represented in metric units meaning that 1.000 = 1 meter. Enabling Perspective Suppression
will render all wireframes with the same thickness (you will have to increase the thickness very much).
Hard Edge Threshold lets you control the angle of the wires that will be included or excluded for
rendering. This Procedural shader has two colors; you can also use it as a mask in the Layered weight.
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You will visit the Bitmap panel quite often, have a look at the image to see all the options it offers.
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Imagine you have multiple bitmaps for one material, like different bitmaps for; the mask, the bump, and
the diffuse color etc, if you need to change the rotation or scale of your texture, it would be time
consuming to change every bitmap one by one. The Bitmap Coordinate panel lets you make changes to
all Bitmaps that the material uses at the same time and you can access it from the tool bar (turn solid
rendering on (shortcut = v) so you can watch the changes you are making to the object)
Normal Ramp is a Procedural shader that let us map the Low and High color according to the normal of the
object. By changing the X, Y and Z direction, we can decide where we want the Normal Ramp to act. In the
image I changed the Low and High color to red and green to make the effect more visible. This Procedural
shader is another one that has two colors and therefore can be used as a mask or weight for a Layered material.
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Fresnel Ramp works the same way as the Fresnel attenuation option we have in the Material component
panel but with the difference that we have more control over it. By default the IOR value is 0.000 and
will act like a cosine attenuation (useful for velvet and satin materials), to get accurate Fresnel attenuation
we need to set IOR higher then 1.000. Depending on the IOR we set, Fresnel will calculate the according
gradient between the Low Color and High Color. Have a look at the next example image
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By altering the Low Color of the two Fresnel weights, we can control how the light will interact with the
object and in this case I wanted to create a mirror like glass and therefore I have to increase the reflection,
but by doing this, I also have to reduce the transparency of the material (remember the energies
conservation Law), both Low Colors have to sum at the end 1.000. This material could not be created
without the Fresnel Ramp!
But there are other situations where we only get accurate materials by using Fresnel Ramp. One case is
Partial Coverage. Varnished wood for example is a combined material and at Microscopic Surface
Level the varnish dos not always cover the wood 100% (if you ever have varnished a wood table, you
know that you need to give it more than one pass). This would be a case of partial coverage. Have a
look at the next image to see how it works
The Material setup for transparent materials with reflection like glass is the same as we did for our basic
plastic material. The Procedural Fresnel weight for the refraction component has to have the Low and
High colors inverted and we can do this by changing the colors or enabling the Invert Attenuation
option (I personally prefer to change the colors for better visual distinction between the different Fresnel
weights). Exit attenuation has to be enabled for transparent materials but only if the transparent material
represents a non scattering material. For sub surface scattering materials, you need to disable Exit
Attenuation. Normally you dont need to create a dielectric glass material because Kerkythea already
provides a dedicated shader for it but sometimes we will need to create special transparent materials that
we cannot build with the Dielectric Glass shader like the material you can see in the following image
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Here we have to change both High colors because we are creating a non transparent material and again we
have to produce a balance between both High colors and make sure that they sum 1.000. Another way to
produce partial coverage is to use a diffuse/specular map. The next image shows how to do it
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First of all we need to ask one question, why do we need a diffuse or specular map?
In what kind of situation a material would have uneven specular reflection? One situation would be a
varnished wood that got some parts of the varnish worn away do to weathering or usage and this would be
an example of partial coverage. In this case we would need to use a second diffuse component with the
same wood bitmap applied as we have in the basic plastic material. A different situation would be a
marble floor that has some dirt or dust on it. In that case we would need to add a modified marble
texture that represents a dirty marble texture. Notice that we only need one texture (the diffuse map or the
specular map) because we have to use the same one in both weights and one of them has to be inverted in
the Bitmap panel (this will guarantee correct energy conservation and also produce correct Fresnel
reflection). Maybe you are used to using two maps (diffuse and specular) and I know that there are a lot of
Texture packs that provides both maps but as I demonstrated earlier, you will not get physically accurate
results with the old method by just applying a diffuse map and a specular map to their respective
channels (Fresnel Reflection)
This is also an example of using a Bitmap as a Mask, lets see with more detail how Masking works.
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With a mask we can separate regions of our model to add more than one material to it.
White color will let the material be visible and black will hide it completely making it possible to add
another material where the black color is by inverting the mask.
Here you can see a very basic setup, remember that we are using the same Bitmap to mask the regions and
that we have to invert the bitmap in one of the Layer weights.
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This would be the setup for a basic plastic material and a basic metal. The important part of using masks
is that we need to be able to invert it; this is very easy with a Bitmap
but we can also use any Procedural shader that Kerkythea offers that have at least two colors. This way
we can invert the results and use it as a mask. Notice that you can use any grayscale values as well which
makes it possible to create materials that fade into each other. With a Procedural shader we can also
control the weight of each material by adjusting the two colors in a way that they sum 1.000 at the end.
I would like to recommend two Texture generator programs that are available for free. Genetica viewer
and Bricks and tiles which let you generate textures with a lot of different maps like Color maps, Bump
maps, Specular maps they work very well with Kerkythea.
http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/
http://www.3d-rekonstruktionen.de/downloads/
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Here is an example using the Procedural wireframe as a mask. Notice that the colors are inverted in one
of the Layer weights.
Lets have a look on how to build a metal material. The easy way and more basic would be to use one of
the specular components from the Matte/Phong or Ashikhmin shader
and give it a Fresnel attenuation with a high IOR value (have a look at page 10 where you can see the IOR
list from Thomas An.). Metals also have Fresnel effect and therefore the specular color must be set to
1.000 intensity otherwise Fresnel cannot do its work accurately! The color of a metal is given with the
Specular Color but the intensity has to be set to 1.000. For darker metals, use a IOR value = 10.00. The
reason I insist that the specular color needs an intensity = 1.000 is because Fresnel and the IOR value will
calculate the reflection strength at different viewing angles and if we set the intensity to something lower
then 1.000, we are interfering in the Fresnel calculation (remember that at 90 degree viewing angle
reflection is always 100% and if we lower the specular color strength, the result at 90 degree can not be
100% reflective)
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At the moment Kerkythea dos not support nk data (laboratory measured complex IOR data) but I know
that it is on the to do list and will be available soon. Anyway nk data are not the solution for
everyday materials because most of these data are measured from pure elements and the metals we use
normally are alloys of different elements. For example 18k Gold is not pure Gold, it is a mixture of 75%
Gold, 20% copper and 5% silver, mixing these metals with complex IOR data will not represent the
correct 18k Gold because only a measured 18k Gold can give the correct complex IOR data. There are no
complex IOR data available for 18k Gold or for Brass and other common metals we use everyday.
Another drawback is that nk data needs much longer render times because of all the data it needs to
calculate. But please dont misunderstand me, I think that nk data can be very useful.
We can get very close to accurate metals by using Procedural Fresnel and the result will be as good as
using nk data because it would be very difficult to say if it is an nk data metal or not. Metals have for the
High Color normally a white color but not always, for example Aluminum has a bluish color at 90 degree
viewing angle (High color). We can use the simple IOR data that are available on optical tables for our
metals. Another observation is that it looks like metals have two kinds of reflection, a blurry one and a
relatively sharper one, both using the same colors of the metal. By changing the relative blurriness /
sharpness and changing their weights, we can build a wide rang of different metals. By using the
Procedural Fresnel, we can give the Low Color any intensity we want and so control the reflectance power
of the metal. Adding a bump map like scratch to the metal can also increase the realism of the material (at
least making a better bump I did) but it is not mandatory to use a bump map for anisotropic reflections.
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This example shows how to build a sub-surface scattering (sss) material. The basic plastic material is our
starting point. Depending what kind of material we want to create, we have to adjust the IOR value and
the shininess value of the specular component (changing the perfect reflection for the specular element if
we need more blurry reflection). Instead of the translucency component, we could have used the
transmittance component.
Remember that the translucency element can be mapped with a bitmap or a procedural shader which gives
use more possibilities than we can explore here.
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Copyright 2007 Patrick Nieborg
Thanks to Giannis for providing Kerkythea and thanks
to all the members of the Kerkythea Forum for their support.
You can join the Kerkythea Forum at http://www.kerkythea.net
This was a basic overview of Kerkytheas Material editor, there are more things to discover and there are
many things that I could not include do to lack of time but I will continue updating this Material Editor
Guide. I would like to give some tricks I use when building materials. First of all it is always good to
study real materials, take them in your hands and look at them from different viewing angles. To find out
how rough or smooth the material is at microscopic surface level, try to find the reflection of the light
source on the material, depending on the blurriness sharpness of the reflection, you can get an idea of the
shininess value you have to use. Often you will not be able to find an IOR value for the material you are
attempting to create, in this case I always try to imagine if the material would be more reflective if I put
water on it or if the water would be more reflective ( imagine a floor that has be cleaned with water and is
still whet, if you can not tell that it is whet, then the IOR has to be higher then the IOR of water, if you can
clearly see that the floor is wet, then the IOR has to be lower than the IOR of water.) IOR of water is 1.33
. There is also a very important thing to know about Fresnel effect and that is, that the effect get less
evident the more you increase the IOR value. IOR values above 3.00 show lees Fresnel effect then values
lower then 3.00 and the shinnies value (Microscopic Surface properties) also has an effect over the Fresnel
effect appearance. The more rough the surface is on Microscopic Surface level, the less evident the
Fresnel effect becomes (the more rough the material is , the more the light reflects in a diffuse way
scatters the light uniformly in all directions ) this is only a guideline to help out in some situations .

Patrick Nieborg 2007
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