3 Close the option window.
4 Now choose WindowDisplay > Hardware Shade without opening the
option window. It applies the Shade settings to the window, without
having to open the window.
You will notice that color and surfaces have been applied to the wire
frame of the personal digital assistant (PDA). These colors and textures
are created by a number of shaders, which are visible in the Resident
Shaders tab of the Visualization panel.
5 Now, turn off Shade by choosing WindowDisplay > Hardware Shade
again.
We will take a quick look at shaders, and the tools you can use to change
them.
Shaders and textures
After you have created wire frames, such as those supplied in the PDA model,
you will want to see them wrapped in surfaces that can then be transformed
into rendered images. To make the rendered images as striking and realistic
as possible, you need to apply shaders and textures to your objects.
Alias uses shaders to define the appearance of your objects, so they look as if
they were created with real materials. Textures can also be applied to the
shaders to create more sophisticated visual effects. As you will discover in later
tutorials, you can even add special effects to shaders to make them appear
semi-transparent or to give them a sense of 3D relief.
Shaders
Shaders determine what surfaces look like (for example, color, reflectivity, and
roughness). Once you create a shader, you can assign it to one or more surfaces.
You can also layer more than one shader on any given surface.
The Visualization panel
The visualization panel provides you with fast access to libraries of shaders
and to the most-used capabilities of the multi-lister.
In the previous section of this tutorial, when you switched to shaded mode
via WindowDisplay > Hardware Shade , you were viewing a shader we already
applied to the model. Let’ s now look at the shaders in the Visualization panel.
618 | Chapter 9 An introduction to Rendering
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