Raytrace Material

The Raytrace material is an advanced surface-shading material. It supports the same kinds of diffuse surface shading that a standard material does. It can also create fully raytraced reflections and refractions. It also supports fog, color density, translucency, fluorescence, and other special effects.

• Material/Map Browser > Materials > Scanline > Raytrace
Note: The material appears in the Material/Map Browser only if the active renderer supports it.

Balls using raytrace material to reflect each other

The reflections and refractions Raytrace material generates are more accurate than those produced by the Reflect/Refract map. Rendering raytraced objects can be slower than using Reflect/Refract. On the other hand, Raytrace is optimized for rendering 3ds Max scenes. You can further optimize it for your scene by excluding specific objects from raytracing.

Note: If you want accurate, raytraced reflections or refractions in a standard material you can use the Raytrace map, which uses the same raytracer. The Raytrace map and material share global parameter settings.

Attention: Raytrace map and Raytrace material use a surface's normal to decide whether a ray is entering or exiting a surface. If you flip the normals of an object, you can get unexpected results. Making the material 2-Sided doesn't correct the problem as it often does with reflections and refractions in Standard materials.

In some cases, the colors in the Basic Parameters rollout of Raytrace material behave differently from colors in standard materials. Standard material has a diffuse shading model that does an excellent job of rendering solid, nonreflective objects such as plastic, ceramic, and so on. In effect, this model applies color to the object. The color components in Raytrace material, on the other hand, attempt to model their physical counterparts in nature.

In Raytrace material, the surface reflects its Diffuse color component without specular reflection, while the Reflect color component controls the amount of specular reflection. These two material components are layered together. The results you see depend on the layering effect. For example, if the material is not transparent and completely reflective, no diffuse color is visible. If the material is not transparent and completely nonreflective, only the diffuse color is visible.

Raytrace material has a large user interface with a lot of controls. In general, if you are using Raytrace to create reflections and refractions, the controls in the Basic Parameters rollout are the only ones you need to adjust. The Extended Parameters rollout for Raytrace has controls for special effects. The Raytracer Controls rollout affects the raytracer itself. Use the Raytracer Controls to turn the raytracer on or off, and to toggle other options. Use the Raytracer Global Parameters Rollout (Rendering Raytrace Globals) to set options globally (for all Raytrace materials and maps in the scene), including recursion depth.