This document covers the fundamentals of adding colors and textures in 3D modeling, focusing on properties such as diffuse, specular, emissive, and ambient. A practical tutorial guides users through creating a sci-fi ball, explaining how to manipulate material properties, apply textures, and utilize lighting for desired effects. The tutorial concludes with instructions on exporting and sharing the completed scene.

1. What is a project without colours or textures? Not much, to get more life into your scenes it is important to know the
fundamentals of the powerful and essential Material Component.
Let’s get right in to it!
Material Fundamentals
The basics of adding colours and textures

2. For this tutorial, the focus will be on Diffuse, Specular, Emissive and Ambient. A cool Sci-Fi ball will be created.
As this is the Material fundamentals a few areas will be left for future tutorials. Things like Normal map input, Opacity
and Reflectivity will be covered in another tutorial together with the bottom part of the Material Component.

3. This is the basic look of the different properties in the Material Component. A color channel where you can select the
color value of the property and then the texture input where you add 2d images to be placed on the model. Use the
eye icon to disable the color. Note that the default color varies between the properties. Also remember that changing
the color input will tint the texture with the selected color.

4. Start by creating a new scene and delete the “default light” from the hierarchy, this is the default light setup which is
not wanted for this exercise.
Then simply create sphere from the + CREATE menu, adjust all the properties in the Material Component so the color
channels are set to black. The sphere should be completely black and without any lights in the scene.

5. Lights and colors go hand in hand and a lot of the settings in the Material panel react to the lights in your scene.
Place a directional light over the sphere and rotate it about -25 degrees in the X axis.
Since everything is set to black the light should not affect the sphere and it will still be completely black.

6. Great, let's get stuff happening here. Increase the Diffuse color to white and the sphere will be affected.
Color or “Diffuse” is the surface brightness of an object. It’s completely dependent on the lights in your scene and
appears where it’s facing the light source, with its strongest value perpendicular to the source. Rotating the light will
show you this effect.

7. Adding a texture to a channel will wrap the image around the sphere. The part of the texture that is lit by the light will
be visible.
There are a few different ways to add textures, the most useful and common way to do it is to use the drag and drop
feature. Grab an image anywhere of the computer and drop it to the wanted property, the field will light up to indicate
that you are in a drop friendly zone.

8. Specularity is used for the highlight and the roughness of the material’s surface. It works to some extend in the same
way as the diffuse property, both of them are determined by the lights in your scene. The big difference is that
specularity is depending on the observer's angle of view. Which results in that the highlight “moves” across surface.
The shininess slider controls the highlights concentration, where a high value gives a dense highlight seen in
polished surfaces like car paint. A low value gives more spread to the highlight as in brushed metal.

9. In this example a bit of blue tint is set in the color input of the Specular. A lower shininess value is used to get a
bigger highlight.
With a texture you can further define where and how the highlight should be and look. The black parts of the map
don't allow any specularity to go through and the white parts let everything pass. Experiment further with different
maps to get other results.

10. To be able to manipulate how the image is wrapped on the sphere go to the the Geometry Component, it’s right
above the Material Component and change the Texture mode to Polar. This will give you a better result in this
exercise. The primitives in Create all have different Texture modes to achieve the wanted result. This is similar to UV
maps for custom meshes, which is a big subject on its own.

11. The Emissive property is associated with strong light, glow, high temperature etc. Use it for faking a light source or
something that is emitting light. This property can be used regardless of having a light or not in your scene, but it is
still affected by other properties as it gets screened on top of the rest of the layers.
For this example let’s put a strong orange color together with a texture of glowing hexagons.

12. Next up, the Ambient property, used mainly for the base lighting of an object, also light bakes and occlusion maps are
inserted here.
The hexagons facing away from the light have been pitch black until now as no light hits that side, connecting a map
to the Ambient gives the illusion that some reflected light is bouncing of the backside of the sphere. With a mid grey
in the color channel the effect is subtle but effective.

13. Lets end this tutorial by publishing our Sci-Fi ball scene by clicking on Export Scene in the top navigation bar and
then pressing publish. In order to share your scene simply publish your resulting link.
You’re done!
Great job, you have mastered the Material fundamentals