Types of Materials

From ZBrush Info

The Material palette shows many different materials. However, there are only five basic types of materials; the others are variations of theses basic types.

Flat Color Material The Flat Color material is not a true material in that it has no shading or other material attributes. It is pure white and appears incandescent alongside other materials.

FastShader Material The FastShader Material contains only diffuse and ambient attributes. It is primarily used for modeling when simple shading of the model is required.

BasicMaterial The BasicMaterial forms the basis for most of the standard materials, including:

• Toy Plastic
• Double Shader material
• TriShader materials
• QuadShader materials

These materials contain all the same attributes as a Basic material except that they have either 1, 2, 3 or 4 shader channels.

Fiber Material The fiber material adds 3D hair-like strands to the image. By default the hairs are drawn along the surface normals (so on a sphere the fibers will appear sticking straight out), though you can adjust this and other fiber properties in the material settings.

MatCap Materials MatCap materials use image maps to simulate the effects of lighting on different types of surface. As the lighting is fixed by the image map, they do not respond to changes made in the Light palette. MatCap stands for material capture and using the MatCap tool you can quickly create your own MatCap materials that effectively simulate real world surfaces.

To Learn About Using Material Modifiers Click Here.

To Learn About MatCap Materials Click Here.