Shaders

Anastropic

This is a very useful shader for a variety of real-world objects, such as hair, glass, or brushed metal. If the specular highlight on an object should come together in a narrow beam, instead of the broad circle that the Blinn/Phong shaders generate, then the Anisotropic shader is what you need.

Blinn
Blinn shader is the default shader. It renders simple circular highlights and smoothes adjacent faces. The Blinn shader includes color swatches for setting Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, and Self-Illumination colors.

Metal

This was in use until the Anastropic shader was introduced, it is more simple in the way it works, there is a dimple in the specular graph, which means that the shader is useful for dull metal materials such as brushed stainless steel.

Muli-layer

This is very good for metalic objects, particularly cars, as it has two layers of specularity. You can also change the colours of the specular layer to add subtle tones.

Orin-Nayer-Blinn

This is much softer in tone than Blinn and produces a very soft feel to the material. It is ideal for organic materials such as skin, velvet, as it slightly absorbs light.

Phong

This is one of the original shaders and is not really used anymore. Gives a plastic feel to a material.

Strauss

This shader is best used for more advanced modeling of metallic surfaces. Its specular highlights can be modified, but it doesn’t quite look like the Metal shader.

Translucent

This is a fun shader - and can be used to produce psychodelic influences on the material, glowing effects etc. It offers translucency, and opacity plus filter colour.