Materials allow you to make your scenes come to life with specular reflections and glowing lights. From the Color Palette, tap the “Material” button. This will let you select from 8 material layers. Tap edit to modify a the selected layer.
You can set the Roughness and Metalness of a material layer with two sliders. Metalness increases how reflective the material is, while roughness blurs the reflection.
Emission is the brightness of a glowing voxel. Colors will become distorted brighter and start to glow with higher emissive setting.
You can turn off shadows for materials, which is good for fire or glass which do not cast a shadows.
Tap “Save” to apply the new material settings, or “Back” to keep the old setting. Material layers are not bound to the colors, but to the placed voxels. So you can use the same color swatch with multiple materials, and changing material settings will affect only voxels that already use that material, no matter what color they are.
Note: transparent swatches will render better if they are on layers under (higher number) opaque colors. So for best results, keep your diffuse (default), metal, and emissive materials on the upper (lower number) layers, and reserve layers 7 and 8 for glass and liquid.
The material layer in use will appear on the palette button, and the material layer used will also display on the recent swatches. If you use the same orange swatch for both metal and emissive layers, two orange recent swatches will display with their respective layers, and tapping on them will change the current layer being used.
Learn more about the features and tools in Voxel Max with this video.