Materials

Incendia Materials

The material definition on Incendia mainly consists on image maps used for shading the surface of the fractal elements.
Every material has three components: Ambient, Diffuse and Specular.

• The Ambient element is the actual color of the fractal (or its baseshapes).
• The Diffuse is the color of the light source that illuminates the fractal.
• The Specular element is the mirror like reflection caused by the light source on the surface of the fractal.

Incendia uses the [Phong reflection] light model, but instead of solid colors, the program uses textures for enhancing the fractal surface.

The Material Selection buttons

Incendia Materials are organized in the following way:
There are 10 possible material definitions on Incendia and they can be selected by the material index control, that consist in two arrow buttons and the index of the selected material.
Baseshapes can use any of them. But if the fractal doesn't have any Baseshape, the material definition at index 0 is used.
Every material has a Tab control with the following sections:

• Ambient, The Ambient term of the material (includes the Material Browser).
• Diffuse, The Diffuse illumination section of the material (includes the Material Browser).
• Specular, The Specular index of the material.
• Advanced, Advanced material options, such as surface structure materials.

Material Browser

The Material Browser is available for both the Ambient and Diffuse sections. The Browser consists a display of the selected texture, the Texture Library and five control buttons:

• Color, used for solid colors.
• Grad., Load a fractint map file in order to use gradients.
• Ext. Tex., Imports an external texture.
• Texture Generator, Opens the Texture Generator.
• Select, Applies the current selection.

Texture Library

Incendia texture library consists in a series of bitmaps and gradients used for creating materials. You can use the arrows to navigate in the texture library, and click on the desired texture to select it. Once that is done, you can press the “Select” button to apply it to the selected material slot. Also, if you want to use a texture that doesn’t appears on the material editor, you can press the “Ext. Texture” button. This button opens a file panel and lets you navigate in your hard drive to get the texture.
A note on external textures: Incendia use BMP, JPG and PNG file formats.

Color Gradients appears in this panel labeled by "G":



The Color Button is used for defining an specific color to the texture. if you select it a color selector panel will appear:


The Gradient (Grad.) Button is used for loading a Fractint color map file, that will be used for illuminating the surface of the fractal with the different colors of the map file.
Incendia will prompt you for the Fractint map file and once it is loaded, the gradient will appear on the Ambient and Diffuse texture buttons, being the lower part the area less illuminated and the upper part, the most illuminated area:

Material Parameters

Ambient Parameters

• Intensity, Controls how bright or dark the ambient texture appears. For example, if you set it to 0.5, the Ambient texture brightness will be half of the actual texture values. If you set it to 2.0, for example, the brightness will be twice of the original texture.
• Rotation Angle, rotates the Ambient texture by n degrees.

Diffuse Parameters

• Intensity, Works in the same way that the Ambient parameter, controlling how bright or dark the texture will be. This parameter is affected by the light source, being illuminated by it (or shadowed if the light source is blocked.
• Rotation Angle, rotates the Diffuse texture by n degrees.

Specular Parameters

• Intensity Controls the brightness of the specular element.
• Magnitude, This parameter controls how concentrated the specular reflection is. If you set it to lower values, the specular reflection will be diffused over the illuminated face of the fractal.

Fresnel Equation Parameters (Fresnel Ext., Fresnel Int.)
These parameters define the Fresnel coefficients (external reflection and internal refraction) for the surface of the fractal. The colors of the refracted and reflected light are taken from the skylight equations or a bitmap background.

The Shadow Depth parameter.
This parameter determines the depth of the shadows. If you set it to 1.0, the shadows disappears.

The Reset Materials Button

This button restore the default values in the material parameters panel for current slot.