Shading
At render time, patches are smoothed out and subdivided into triangles.
How smooth a patch becomes is controlled using the Object
Info palette's U & V Subdivision
settings. The higher these values, the smoother the patch will appear
at render time and the more memory it will require. Each triangle is
a planar surface with its front oriented in one direction. The renderer
calculates the relation between this orientation and the light sources
in order to determine the shading of each triangle.
Ambient, Diffuse, Specular
Areas of Illumination
A surface rendered in PiXELS:3D combines three different types of illumination
to simulate the physical properties of light; ambient, diffuse and specular.
Ambient shading represents the global īscattered' light present in most
scenes. A scene within a brightly lit white room would have high ambience.
A scene in outer space would have no ambience. A shader with no diffuse
or specular, but 100% ambient can be used on objects which require no
shading, like backgrounds or glowing objects. Diffuse shading is the
base illumination of any object, showing the subtle fluctuations in
a surface through variations in highlight and shadow. Specular shading
simulates the effect of light rays bouncing from the object to the observer's
eyes, creating a highlight or hot spot. The size of this highlight can
be controlled through the Roughness parameter to simulate a wide variety
of materials, from plastic to metal.
Defining Colors
There are many options for defining colors. The most common is to use
the User Color node.
