Materials, Lights, and Shading

Abstract

As you saw in the previous chapter, all meshes (including internally created primitives and imported models) are built from geometric elements such as triangles and line segments that have their shapes defined by vertex points. For the renderer to be able to draw these elements to the view, an appearance definition similar to the line and fill style settings used in the native drawing API in Flash is required. In 3D, this definition is frequently referred to as a material, and in Away3D, it takes the form of a class instance that can be set in the material property of an individual element or global mesh object. Materials can be used to paint solid colors or bitmap images onto the surface of 3D objects, and special types can define how an object should react to light in a scene.