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[Learn: The How To series from Adobe]
[♪Chimes♪]
Hey there, folks; Brian Maffit here with Total Training.
To make your 3D scenes look their best,
you'll need to understand what's happening with
the various new 3D material properties.
So let's take a look at a scene I just created for Total Training on-line.
Here we see a curved wall of Adobe CS6 icons
sitting atop a stage,
which is a simple vector shape that I've extruded and rotated 90 degrees,
and there's a backdrop with just a simple plane
with a gradient applied to it to simulate a column of light.
I want to see our boxes and backdrop
reflected in the stage,
but in a semi-realistic way.
If we just crank up the reflection intensity,
we'll get a mirrored effect, but that's not what a stage floor looks like.
Even set to 50%, it creates a better-lit result,
but the reflections are obviously fake.
A stage floor can be shiny,
but unless it's super highly polished or wet,
its shininess will be more diffuse.
We can control that with the Reflection Sharpness Value.
The smaller the value, the blurrier the reflection;
in our case, a value of about 80 looks right to me.
And in the real world,
reflections aren't absolute; they vary based on the amount of light
and distance and even the density of the atmosphere.
We can't control all of those things, but we can simulate some of it
with the Reflection Roll-off Control.
As I crank it up, you see that the bright reflections
at the back of the stage stay prominent,
but the darker reflections at the sides of the stage
become more subtle, giving us a more pleasant result.
As for these last properties
related to transparency,
let me turn on our monolith layer
to reveal a large, metallic blog
in the middle of the stage.
With some reflections already turned on,
but I don't want this to be a big, bronze lozenge;
I want it to be a big tank of water,
so I want to adjust our transparency setting to about 50%,
revealing that we can see through the monolith now,
but there is no distortion like you would get
with a transparent solid like a tank of water.
For that we need to adjust the index of refraction.
This ranges from a value of 1,
which gives no distortion,
up to 5, which gives us basically the same refraction
you would get from solid glass or water.
The more we crank this up,
the more distortion we see,
and the transparency roll-off adjustment is subtle,
but it lets you diminish the refraction
when the angle of the object gets too steep,
as we see around the edges of our cylinder.
Obviously, this is an artistic process,
and you'll tweek these settings as you fine tune your scene,
but with only a little time and a few tweek,
we're on our way towards a satisfying looking
final composition.
