Material Textures Influence

Not only can textures affect the color of a material, they can also affect many of the other properties of a material. The different aspects of a material that a texture influences are controlled in the Influence panel.

Note

Texture options for Surface and Wire materials and in some cases also for Volume and Halo materials.

Surface and Wire materials

Texture Influence panel for a Surface material

Diffuse

Intensity: Amount texture affects affects diffuse reflectivity
Color: Amount texture affect the basic color or RGB value of the material
Alpha: Influences the opacity of the material. See Use Alpha for Object Transparency. Also use Z Transparency for light and if combining multiple channels.
Translucency: Influences the Translucency amount.

Specular

Intensity: Amount texture affect specular reflectivity
Color: Influences the Specular color, the color of the reflections created by the lamps on a glossy material.
Hardness: Influences the specular hardness amount. A DVar of 1 is equivalent to a Hardness of 130, a DVar of 0.5 is equivalent to a Hardness of 65.

Shading

Ambient: Influences the amount of Ambient light the material receives.
Emit: Influences the amount of light Emitted by the material.
Mirror: Influences the mirror color. This works with environment maps and raytraced reflection.
Ray Mirror: Influences the strength of raytraced mirror reflection.

Geometry

Normal: Commonly called bump mapping, this alters the direction of the surface normal. This is used to fake surface imperfections or unevenness via bump mapping, or to create reliefs.
Warp: Warp allows textures to influence/distort the texture coordinates of a next texture channel. The distortion remains active over all subsequent channels, until a new Warp has been set. Setting the factor at zero cancels out the effect.
Displace: Influences the Displacement of vertices, for using Displacement Maps.

Other Controls

Blend: Blending operation to perform. See Texture Blending Modes for details.
RGB to intensity: With this option enabled, an RGB texture (affects color) is used as an intensity texture (affects a value).
Blend Color: If the texture is mapped to Col, what color is blended in according to the intensity of the texture? Click on the swatch or set the RGB sliders.
Negative: The effect of the Texture is negated. Normally white means on, black means off, Negative reverses that.
Stencil: The active texture is used as a mask for all following textures. This is useful for semitransparent textures and "Dirt Maps". Black sets the pixel to "untexturable". The Stencil mode works similar to a layer mask in a 2D program. The effect of a stencil texture can not be overridden, only extended. You need an intensity map as input.
DVar: Destination Value (not for RGB). The value with which the Intensity texture blends with the current value. Two examples:

The Emit value is normally 0. With a texture mapped to Emit you will get maximal effect, because DVar is 1 by default. If you set DVar to 0 no texture will have any effect.

If you want transparent material, and use a texture mapped to Alpha, nothing happens with the default settings, because the Alpha value in the Material panel is 1. So you have to set DVar to 0 to get transparent material (and of course Z Transparency also). This is a common problem for beginners. Or do it the other way round - set Alpha to 0 and leave Dvar on 1. Of course the texture is used inverted then.

Bump Mapping

Settings for bump mapping.

Method

Best Quality, Default, Compatible, Original

Space: Texture Space, Object Space, View Space

Volume materials

Texture Influence panel for Volume material

Special texture options for Volume materials

Density: Causes the texture to affect the volume's density.
Emission: Causes the texture to affect the volume's emission.
Scattering: Amount the texture affects scattering.
Reflection: Amount the texture affects brightness of out-scattered light
Emission Color: Amount the texture affects emission color.
Transmission: Amount the texture affects result color after light has been scattered/absorbed.
Reflection Color: Amount the texture affects color of out-scattered light.

Halo materials

Texture Influence panel for a Halo material

Special texture options for Halo materials

Size: Amount the texture affects ray mirror.
Hardness: Amount the texture affects hardness.
Add: Amount the texture affects translucency.

Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Influence/Material