Materials

Materials

A material is one 32-bit flag word, some colors, an opacity and up to three textures. The panel is in Properties ▸ Material ▸ 4DS Material Properties.

The three boxes

Box	What it is
Diffuse	The texture the surface is painted with. Use Diffuse Texture must be on for it to be read at all.
Alpha	A second texture holding transparency, switched on with Use Alpha Texture.
Environment	A reflection texture, blended over the diffuse by the environment ratio.

Draws as

The panel says, in words, what the game will do with the combination you have set: opaque, blended at some opacity, cut out by a color key, added, and so on. It is worked out the way the engine works it out, so it is the quickest way to see whether the switches mean what you wanted.

Color keys

A color-keyed material cuts away every pixel of one color — the game's usual way of making a fence, a sign or a railing. Switch on Color Key and the add-on reads the key color out of the texture's own palette when it is a paletted BMP, which is what the game's textures are. The preview in Blender cuts exactly what the game cuts.

Animated textures

A material can play a sequence: FIRE00.BMP, FIRE01.BMP and on. Only the last two digits change, and the count and period live on the material. The panel says which files it expects and how many it found, and offers Fix Texture File where one of them is written in a way the game misreads.

Note

A model holds file names, not textures. Anything you use has to exist in the game's maps folder under that name, and the export warns about any that do not.

Flags

Every bit of the flag word is listed in LS3D-4DS-Flag-Usage.html in the repository, with how many of the game's own models actually set it. Bits the engine keeps to itself are written back exactly as they came in.