Component: Advanced Material

For applications needing fine-tuning, the ShapeDiverMaterial component provides advanced control over all the parameters of the Metalness / Roughness PBR workflow. A complete overview of this approach is out of the scope of our documentation, but you can find more information here.

Download an example model
This model explains how to set up the ShapeDiverMaterial components and all its parameters, including texture definitions.

The parameters available in this component are the following:

• Metalness and Roughness: those two parameters have values in the range [0..1] and define how the material handles reflections. Metalness defines how metallic the object looks, while roughness introduces some blur to the reflections that simulate imperfections.

• Opacity: This is a parameter in the [0..1] range (0=transparent, 1=opaque).
• Textures: all of the textures available in the metalness/roughness workflow can be set on ShapeDiver (except the ambient occlusion texture, which will be added in the future). The bitmap textures need to be uploaded in a public online location. Their public URL can then be used as a text parameter input to the ShapeDiverMaterial component. One can define a color texture, a normal texture and a bump map texture. Additionally, the previous parameters can also be defined by textures: instead of a single numerical value, the metalness, roughness and opacity parameters can take text URL inputs defining maps.
• Flat Shading: when this option is activated, there is no smoothing of the object's normals in the viewer, which gives the objects a facetted look.

Adjust materials after uploading
The preview in Grasshopper is only an approximation of the final online result. For that reason, it is not practical to define all material settings before uploading to the platform. We recommend to connect most material factors (roughness, metalness, opacity...) to number sliders. It will give some room for fine-tuning the rendering once the model is online.

Loading textures via URL and the caching system
ShapeDiver’s caching system stores all processed solutions to speed up the computation time, read more here. This means also that any texture loaded from a public URL is cached and stays the same even if the file on the remote location changed. In order to update textures, a timestamp or version string has to be added to the query part of the URL, for example:
https://www.mywebsite.com/ShapeDiverTextures/texture.png?v=TIMESTAMP_OR_VERSION
The caching system then takes it as a different URL and updates the image on the server side.

Finally, after defining any material, it needs to be input in the ShapeDiverDisplayGeometry component to assign it to geometry.

Vertex Colors
Mesh vertex colors are supported and will be displayed in ShapeDiver. If a mesh within an uploaded definition contains vertex colors, they will be used instead of the base color defined in the ShapeDiverMaterial component. However, the color textures can still be used in conjunction with vertex colors, both values being multiplied together for rendering.