The Advanced interface to Material Room offers access to some more properties of the same material on one hand, and offers access to far more ways to define the details of all properties in the other hand. Creating and managing materials through the Advanced interface is considered Intermediate to Advanced level. While working from the Simple interface, one might wonder: “what do I miss?”.
Intermediate
The following features are / are not supported in the Simple interface:
- Supported: Diffuse, Specular and Ambient Color, plus an eventual Image_Map or Movie node from which the Image_Source and the Texture_Strength properties are supported. For Specular, the Highlight_Size property is supported.
Not supported: Neither the Diffuse/Specular/Ambient-Value properties, nor the Alt_Diffuse/Specular properties, nor any other node beside Image_Map and Movie are supported in the Simple interface. No Clay, no Subsurface Scattering (translucency). Translucency from the Advanced interface is not supported in any way.
. - Supported: For Reflection, the Image_Map node as well as the Reflect (raytrace) node are supported, including the Color. Also the Light color and Object color multiplicators (Reflection Lite Mult and Reflection Kd Mult checkboxes) are supported.
Not supported: Neither the Reflection Value property nor any other nodes beside Image_Map and Movie are supported.
. - Supported: Transparency, with an eventual Image_Map, and including Edge and Falloff, is supported.
Not supported: Refraction, Fresnel nodes and similar are not supported.
. - Supported: Bump / Displacement, with a required Image_Map (no map, no effect), plus the Amount option are supported.
But: the checkbox in the Simple interface forces me to choose between either Bump or Displacement, I cannot have it both.
. - Not supported: Features like Gradient Bump/Mode which give access to Normal maps, and like ToonID and Custom Output for advanced render pass handling, are not available in the Simple interface. The Custom_Outputs are available in Poser Pro only, by the way.