Manual:Material Tree

The Material Tree is a tree that holds the POV-Ray texture related items (materials, textures, medias, color maps, pigments, pigment maps, etc.). The zero-th level nodes in that three contains items collections. Only items directly parented by a collection, i.e. only items in the first level nodes, can be referenced by others scene items (e.g. a object can reference a texture only if the texture is hold by the texture collection, a rainbow object can reference a color map only if the color map is hold by the color map collection, etc.).

The key point when working with the material editor is to realize that every node in the material tree has a context sensitive menu that you can pop up by right clicking the node. The top part of the menu presents the subcomponents that you may attach to that particular item e.g. if you right click the material collection node you will have the menu item to create a new material, if you do so and then right click the newly created material you will have menus items to attach to it a texture, a interior texture, a interior and transforms.



You may also add child nodes by copying and pasting or dragging and dropping a node into the desired item. Both operations are context sensitive and if they cannot be done in some particular circumstance there will be visual clues (disabled buttons, 'no signal' cursor, etc.).

There several reasons for an action to be disabled in a particular circumstance:


 * The action just doesn't make sense (E.g. pasting a color_map into an interior, adding a patterned texture as a texture layer or dragging and dropping a node as its child node).
 * The action will hurt the dependency chain (I.e. it will create a cyclic dependency graph that cannot be export to POV-Ray).
 * The action implies removing a referenced item from a collection (E.g. you are trying to make a referenced color_map from the color maps collection a component in a blend map pigment).

Once you select a node in the collection tree, the center panel will show the dialogs (if any) for editing the correspondent item. If the item is (or has as parent) a material or a texture, you have the possibility to create a thumbnail preview of it in the right-most panel.

The preview image will be kept with the item for fast visualization as long it is up-to-date, meaning that if you change any of the items parameters the thumbnail will be automatically erased. Obviously you can create a new one at any time.