Material Settings

Reference

Panel

Material ‣ Settings and Shader Editor ‣ Sidebar ‣ Settings

Surface

Multiple Importance Sample

By default objects with emitting materials use both direct and indirect light sampling methods, but in some cases it may lead to less noise overall to disable direct light sampling for some materials. This can be done by disabling the Multiple Importance Sample option. This is especially useful on large objects that emit little light compared to other light sources.

This option will only have an influence if the material contains an Emission node; otherwise it will be disabled.

Transparent Shadows

Use transparent shadows if it contains a Transparent BSDF, disabling will render faster but will not give accurate shadows.

Displacement Method

Method used to perform Displacement on materials.

Displacement Only

Mesh vertices will be displaced before rendering, modifying the actual mesh. This gives the best quality results, if the mesh is finely subdivided. As a result, this method is also the most memory intensive.

Bump Only

When executing the surface shader, a modified surface normal is used instead of the true normal. This is a less memory intensive alternative to actual displacement, but only an approximation. Surface silhouettes will not be accurate and there will be no self-shadowing of the displacement.

Displacement and Bump

Both methods can be combined, to do displacement on a coarser mesh, and use bump mapping for the final detail.

Volume

Sampling Method
Distance

For dense volumes lit from far away Distance sampling is usually more efficient.

Equiangular

If you have got a light inside or near the volume then equiangular sampling is better.

Multiple Importance

If you have a combination of both, then the multiple importance sampling will be better.

Interpolation

Interpolation method to use for the volume objects and smoke simulation grids.

Linear

Simple interpolation which gives good results for thin volumes.

Cubic

Smoothed high-quality interpolation needed for more dense volumes, but slower.

Homogeneous Volume

Assume volume has the same density everywhere (not using any textures), for faster rendering. For example absorption in a glass object would typically not have any textures, and so the renderer can be set to avoid taking small steps to sample the volume shader. Usually this is automatically determined by the renderer. This setting provides a manual control for cases where it is not detected.

Step Rate

Adjust distance between volume shader samples for volume shaders. This is typically used to reduce the step size for procedural shaders that add more detail with procedural textures, when it is not captured by the default step size. See Volume Render Settings for more information.