Materials
Surfaces of real objects have different color and reflective
properties. Metal is shiny, unpolished wood is not. To model different types of
surfaces, every entity has Material property.
Programmatically properties of the material can be modified using
IMaterial_DG interface.
Flat color material.
A material keeps three colors in RGB format and one
float number - shininess. The three colors are
Ambient color - component of ambient light, which the surface
reflects. Ambient light is the light, which scattered in the environment.
Diffuse color - component of diffuse light, which the surface
reflects. Diffuse color comes from particular direction, most often from
a light source but scattered in all directions equally. Diffuse light reflects with most intensity when it comes squarely down on the surface.
Specular color is the color which comes from particular
direction and is
reflected in a preferred direction, thus creating spotlights.
Each color is represented by three numbers of float
type in range 0.0 to 1.0 for Red, Green and Blue components.
Shininess of the material represented by single float number in range
0.0 to 128.0. The higher the value is, the smaller and brighter are
highlights on the surface.
LightingEnabled property of a material determines whether lighting of the scene will be taken into acount during rendering of the surface.
Textures
Instead of flat color a material can use texture to model materials with a specific pattern of the surface like wood
or metal. Texture can be any image.
A texture can be applied for the whole entity or per face.
See also: Texture Programming sample
Wire frame related properties
UseForWire is true, color of the material will be used for wires rendered in wireframe rendering mode.
WireFrameColor (black the default) property determines color of the wires rendered in wireframe rendering mode
UseGlobalWireColor is true, color of the wires is determined by the 'global' wire color maintained as the WireColor color (id = 4) property of the Component Context.
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