Material Channels

Material Channels is a feature of IRender nXt which is used to alter the colors of a rendered image by adjusting the color of all pixels which are rendered from a single material.

With Material Channels you can select a face in the rendered image and adjust the color of all pixels rendered from the same material using the slider bars.

You can also use material channels to adjust the brightness of "glow" images - such as the screen on the monitor in this sample image.

• Change Hue or Brightness of all pixels directly rendered from a material.
• Change Luminance of a material which is a image with glow applied.
• Save changes to apply to re-renderings of this model, or to apply to renderings of other models using similar materials.

Videos and Tutorials

• Material Channels Video

Dialog

You can invoke Material Channels by right clicking on a surface with a material in the rendered image. Select 'Change Color' to load the Materials Channel Dialog.

• RGB or HSL - select the color mode desired
• Sliders - adjust the value to set the new average color for the material in the rendering.
• Load - load a saved style for material color settings.

Note: Load will only save materials in the saved file which had been adjusted. Materials which were not adjusted are not saved in the file.

• Save - Save the current color settings to be reloaded later.

Note: Save only saves the materials which have been adjusted, so you can save a new color for a single material by clicking 'Reset All materials, adjusting just one material, and using Save to save a new setting for just the one material.

• Reset Current Material - reset the current material to use the average color determined by the rendering.
• Reset All Materials - reset all materials to use the average color determined by the rendering.
• Close - close this dialog.

Adjusting Self Glow on images

Original Luminance

Material Channels can be used to adjust the self glow on an image. Right click on the image, select Change Color, switch to HSL mode and adjust the Luminance to adjust the glow intensity of the image.

• Note: This works better to lower the intensity than to raise it. So start with a little more intensity than you expect to use.

With Luminance lowered.

Limitations

Color of fabric on left wall changed to red. However, the color of the reflection of the fabric in the mirror is not changed.

• Reflections: The color or reflections of the material in a mirror or other reflective surfaces is not altered.
• Indirect Lighting: The color of light reflected from a material is not changed.

If either of these present a problem, then you will need to change the material itself and re-render.

• Using the new color to change the material.

There is no way to automatically apply the color change to the original material. You can change the material color and re-render, but the effect will not be exactly the same.

White Walls

Boothy pointed out that you can also make quick adjustments to walls using the Material/Color channels feature.

Here is a rendering of a house which we used for our first Webinar;

By clicking on the material in the back wall, you can select Change Color

This brings up a Wizard which lets you make changes to the color of a material after rendering.

Here I changed it to HSL (rather than RGB) mode, which lets you set the luminance of the color directly. And used the slider bar to move it more towards white.

Note Material Channels does not re-render the model, so if you change the color too much, any anti-aliasing at the edge of the color will not be changed properly, and also any reflections of a color will not be changed. But it can be a good idea for Walls.

See: White Walls

See also