Material maps

Intermediate Artist Programmer

Material maps calculate how materials are rendered. They can use two kinds of values: color (RGB) values or scalar (single float) values.

You can use material maps for several purposes, including gloss maps, diffuse maps, or blend maps (for combining material layers)

Material maps can fetch values using one of several providers:

Vertex stream: a value taken from mesh attributes
Binary operator: a combination of any other two providers
Float4 / Float: a constant value
Color: a hex color value
Shader: a value provided by a ComputeColor shader. This lets you use procedural values
Texture: a value sampled from a texture

To choose the provider, click (Replace) and select it from the drop-down menu:

media/material-colors-1.png

Vertex stream

This provider takes a value from an attribute of the mesh of the model you apply the material to.

It has two modes: Color Vertex Stream and Custom Vertex Stream. To switch between them, with Vertex Stream selected as the provider, click (Replace) and choose the mode you want to use.

Vertex stream mode

Color vertex stream

Takes a color value from the mesh.

Property	Description
Index	The index in the named stream
Channel	The channel (RGBA) to sample from the stream

Custom vertex stream

Takes a value from the mesh channel you specify.

Property	Description
Name	Semantic name of the channel to read data from
Channel	The channel (RGBA) to sample from the stream

Binary operator

Perform a binary operation from two color/scalar value providers. You can nest as many material maps inside binary operators as you need (including further binary operators).

To choose how the operation works, click (Replace) and select from the drop-down menu. The operations are similar to options when blending layers in Photoshop.

Operation mode

Result = LeftColor <operator> RightColor

media/material-colors-4.png

Property	Description
Operator	A binary operator (eg add, multiply, etc)
Left	The left color/scalar used in the operation
Right	The right color/scalar used in the operation

Float4 / Float

Provided directly as a constant value over the whole material.

In the case of RGB values, you control the RGBA value with the X, Y, Z and W values (Float4).

xyzw

In the case of scalar values, you control the value with a slider (Float).

Blend map slider

Color

A value provided from a color hex value. This is only available for material maps that use RGB values.

media/material-colors-3.png

Shader

A value provided by a ComputeColor shader. This lets you use procedural values.

For an example of a ComputeColor shader, see the Particle materials tutorial.

Texture

Sample the color/scalar from a texture.

For example, the images below demonstrate how the texture changes the way Stride blends materials.

Blend map diagram

media/material-colors-2.png

Property	Description
Texture	A reference to a texture
Channel	The channel (R, G, B, A) used to extract the scalar value. Only valid for scalar textures
Texcoord Index	The texture coordinates (u,v) to use from the mesh with this texture
Filtering	The sampling method (eg Linear, Point, Anisotropic, etc)
Address Mode U / V	Defines how (u,v) coordinates are addressed Wrap: Tiles (u,v) at integer junctions. For example, if u ranges from 0.0 to 3.0, the texture repeats three times on the U axis Mirror: Flips (u,v) at integer junctions. For example, if u ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, the texture is displayed as expected; but from 1.0 to 2.0, the texture is mirrored Clamp: Clamps (u,v) to the range (0.0, 1.0)
Scale	A scale applied to (u,v)
Offset	An offset applied to (u,v)