Creating Basic Materials

Introduction to Materials and Mapping

Creating Transparency

 

Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Materials and Mapping Tutorials > Introduction to Materials and Mapping > 

Understanding Ambient Color and Light

Ambient light is used to simulate indirect light, such as the atmospheric light that permeates outdoor scenes. It may also be used to simulate radiosity, which is the color that bounces off brightly colored objects.

Ambient color controls the color of objects in areas of shadow, whenever ambient light is present. Generally, you do not see any effect when you change the ambient color of a material, because ambient lighting is turned off by default.

To see the effect of ambient color in a scene, you must create an ambient light source. You can either create lights that are set to Ambient Only in order to create a localized effect, or use the Environment dialog to affect an entire scene.

Set up the lesson:

• Continue from the previous lesson.

Adjust the ambient light and color:

1. In the Material Editor, choose the beige putty material in the upper-right material sample.
2. Change the Ambient color of the beige putty material to a bright shade of purple.

   The color of the scene does not change.

3. Choose Rendering > Environment. The Environment dialog appears.
4. Click the Ambient color swatch. In the Color Selector, change the Ambient color to a medium shade of gray. Then close the Color Selector and the Environment dialog.

   The materials brighten in direct proportion to the brightness of the Ambient color. The beige putty objects in the scene turn purple.

   

5. Activate the slot containing myorange material.
6. Click the lock button to the left of the Ambient and Diffuse colors to unlock them. Then change the Ambient color from orange to a bright green.

   

   

   Watch the viewport and notice the orange turns bright green.