3D Parameter Window – OpenGL – Material


ChaosPro 3d opengl material 3D Parameter Window Material
 Fig.: 3D Parameters – Material Tab

This tab allows you to adjust the surface of the fractal object. You can adjust some OpenGL specific material properties as well as place a texture onto the fractal.

  • Enabled: You can completely switch on/off material properties: If switched off, the object will be drawn faster, but the fractal object won’t have any fractal specific color or material properties: It will be mono colored.
  • Specular: This parameter specifies the color of the specular highlights of a material.

    In addition to specifying the color of the specular material component you can use the slider to adjust the intensity of the specular color.

  • Emission: Specifies the color of the emitted light of the material.
  • Color: The fractal object already has its own color from the 2D image: Using this slider you can adjust the intensity of the fractal color.
  • Alpha: This value specifies the transparency of the fractal: 1 means opaque, 0 means, fractal object is transparent (i.e. invisible).
  • Shininess: This OpenGL parameter lets you adjust the specular exponent of the material, i.e. how sharp the reflecting areas are.

The specular color and emission color can be adjusted by pressing onto the corresponding small colored circle. The color selection window will appear:

ChaosPro selcolor 3D Parameter Window Material

This window lets you define your color by using the HSL color model (Hue-Saturation-Luminance). It contains:

  • a circular control which displays all colors which can be created if hue and saturation are modified within their complete range: The angle displays the hue, whereas the radius displays the saturation. The luminance is taken from the current color.
  • a vertical slider like control which displays all colors which can be reached if the luminance is modified within their complete range (hue and saturation from current color).

The controls are updated in real time to reflect changes made to hue/saturation or luminance.

You can also assign a texture to the fractal object using the fields below. A texture is simply a standard PNG oder JPG image file which can be mapped onto the fractal object in order to give it a special look. For example you can use a “stone” image as a texture, so the fractals material seems to be a stone.

  • Source: This combobox lets you choose the source of the fractal texture:
    • Off – switches off texture mapping
    • Fractal – perhaps you don’t want to use a special texture, perhaps you just want to use the fractal itself: By choosing this item the 2D image is used to create a texture which then will be mapped onto the fractal.
    • File – you can select any PNG or JPG file: It will be loaded and used as a texture for the fractal object. A sample collection of textures has been provided with ChaosPro, more samples can be downloaded from http://www.chaospro.de.
  • Mode: Mapping a texture onto such complicated structures like a fractal object is quite complicated: The base texture will be distorted in some way. Try these mapping modes to see what fits best to your fractal.
    • Grid : Simply assigns the image to the fractal based on the grid defined by SizeX/SizeY (object tab).
    • Stretch : Tries to detect heavily distorted areas. It then uses a heuristic method to enhance texture quality by distorting the texture.
    • Spherical : Creates a spherical texture mapping.
  • StartX/StartY: These parameters allow you to specify the starting position in the texture: 0 means left or top, 1 means right or bottom.
  • ScaleX/ScaleY: Here you can specify the scale factors of the texture: If ScaleX equals to 3, then the texture will be repeated three times in x directions.

3D Parameter Window – Material