Material Plug-in Display Interface

A material plug-in can customize its display in Nitrous. A material in 3ds Max can have the following display modes:

Mode	Description
Shaded	A simple phong model is used for displaying the material.
Realistic	An advanced material model is used in the viewport for better display.

The Nitrous SDK provides different interfaces for these two modes. The material shaded mode and realistic mode is not necessarily same as the viewport visual style. The following table shows the relationship between the viewport visual style and material mode:

Viewport Visual Style	Material Mode
Shaded	The active mode of each material is used (shaded or realistic).
Realistic	The active mode of each material is used (shaded or realistic).
Facet	Materials use the shaded mode.
Consistent Color	Materials use the shaded mode.
Hidden line	Materials use the shaded mode.

In the Nitrous viewport, materials can customize their shaded mode display through the ISimpleMaterial interface. For realistic mode display, the materials can use the HLSL shader (exposed in IHLSLMaterialTranslator).

For more information about customizing the viewport display, see the Implementing Simple Material and Texture Map Plug-ins with Nitrous and Implementing Advanced Material and Texture Map Plug-ins with Nitrous topics.