Octane Standard Material

Last modified: 10 March 2025

NEW: LightWave 2024 introduces a new Octane Standard Material.

The Standard Surface material closely aligns with the Autodesk Standard Surface shader specification. Much like the Octane Universal Material, the Standard Surface material is an uber surface shader with multiple layers of BSDF(s). It can address nearly all surface characteristics in one unified material.

Attributes:

Base Weight - The materials base weights. This can be a value, or a weight map texture.

Base Color - The material's base color.

Diffuse Roughness - The materials roughness input/

Metalness

Specular Layer

  • Specular Weight

  • Specular Color

  • Specular Roughness

  • Specular IOR

  • Specular Anisotropy - Anisotropy values for the Specular and Transmission materials. -1 is horizontal, while 1 is vertical. A value of 0 is Isotropic.

  • Specular Rotation

Transmission Properties

  • Transmission Weight

  • Transmission Color

  • Transmission Depth

  • Scatter

  • Scatter Anisotropy

  • Dispersion Coefficient

  • Extra Roughness

  • Subsurface Weight

  • Subsurface Color

  • Subsurface Radius

  • Subsurface Scale

  • Subsurface Anisotropy

  • Medium

OctaneRender® has three types of mediums to create translucent surfaces:

  • Absorption Medium - Produces the appearance of a material that absorbs light while passing through a surface. The resulting color depends on the distance that light travels through the material. For more information, see the Texture Overview topic in this manual.

  • Scattering Medium - Similar to the Absorption medium, but with an additional option for simulating subsurface scattering. Subsurface scattering is the phenomena that gives human skin and similar organic surfaces their characteristic glow under certain lighting conditions. It's a major component for creating the look of realistic skin. For more information, see the Texture Overview topic in this manual.

  • Volume Medium - Adds color and other qualities to a VDB file. VDBs are a generic volume format for creating effects such as smoke, fog, vapor, and similar gaseous objects. VDBs can consist of a single frame, or an animated sequence. 3D software packages like LightWave and Houdini generate and export VDBs. You can also download VDB files at http://www.openvdb.org/download/.

Coating Layer

  • Coating Weight

  • Coating Color

The material's coating color.

  • Coating IOR

The coating layer's IOR.

  • Coating Anisotropy

  • Coating Rotation

  • Coating Bump

  • Coating Normal

The coating layer's Normal map. If you don't specify a Normal map, the coating layer uses the default shading normal. Otherwise, it applies the normal-mapped surface to the coating layer.

Sheen Layer

  • Sheen Weight

  • Sheen Color

The material's sheen color

Emission Layer

  • Emission Weight

  • Emission Colour

  • Emission

Thin Film Layer

  • Film Thickness (nm)

The thin film coating's thickness in nanometers.

  • Film IOR

The thin film shader's IOR.

Geometric Properties

Bump Maps

Simulates a relief using a Greyscale texture interpreted as a Height map.

  • Bump

Creates fine details on the material's surface using a Procedural or Image texture. Often a Greyscale image texture connects to this parameter - light areas of the texture indicate protruding bumps, and dark areas indicate indentation. You can adjust the Bump map's strength by adjusting the Power or Gamma values on the Image texture node. These attributes are covered in more detail in the Texture topic in this manual.

  • Bump Height

Normal

Creates the look of fine detail on the surface. A Normal map is a special type of Image texture that uses red, green, and blue color values to perturb the surface normals at render time, giving the appearance of added detail. They can be more accurate than Bump maps, but require specific software such as ZBrush®, Mudbox®, Substance Designer, xNormal, or others to generate. To load a full-color Normal map, set the Normal channel to the RGB Image data type. Note that Normal maps take precedence over Bump maps, so you cannot use a Normal map and a Bump map at the same time.

Displacement

Accepts Displacement maps, allowing you to create very detailed geometry with a low memory footprint.

Round Edges

Rounds the geometry edges by using a shading effect instead of creating additional geometry.

Opacity

Determines what parts of the surface are visible in the render. Dark values indicate transparent areas, and light values indicate opaque areas. Values in-between light and dark indicate semi-transparent areas. You can lower the Opacity value to fade the object's overall visibility, or you can use a Texture map to vary the opacity across the surface. For example, if you want to make a simple polygon plane look like a leaf, you would connect a black-and-white image of the leaf's silhouette to the Opacity channel of the Diffuse shader. When using an Image texture map, set the Data Type to Alpha Image if the image has an alpha channel, or Grayscale Image for black-and-white images, to load an image for setting the transparency. To invert the transparency regions, use the image's Invert checkbox.

Material Layer

Adds a material layer above the base layer. See the Material Layers topic in this manual for more details.

LightWave Material