How It Works
Materials are defined for each mesh in the Meshes window. They determine the way a collection of faces will be lit and textured.
Reference
The material properties dialog is used to edit the various attributes of a material, such as it's color, opacity and texture map.
Ambient - The color of this material as lit by ambient light.
Diffuse - The color of this material as lit by diffuse light (multiplied by a diffuse map if present).
Specular - The color of this material as lit by specular light (multiplied by a specular map if present).
Sharpness - The focus of the specular highlights on the material. A lower value creates a softer effect.
Emissive - The color of this material as lit by it's own emissive light (multiplied by an emissive map if present).
Opacity - The 'solidness' of the material, where 100% is completely opaque, and 0% is completely transparent.
Environment Reflection - How much the environment map is reflected in the material.
Environment Gradient - How much the environment map is reflected depending on the viewing angle and surface angle.
Texture Map - lets you specify the diffuse map for the material. Click Add to import a file from disk.
Opacity Map - lets you specify the opacity map for the material - if used, this must be the same size as the diffuse map.
Bump Map - the given image will be automatically converted into a normal map, using the brightness of pixels to determine height.
Normal Map - the given image is a special normal map (floating point texture) that gives the normal XYZ at each pixel.
Specular Map - the image is used to determine the amount of specular light at each pixel, brighter is more.
Emissive Map - the image color multiplied by the emissive light color to self illuminate each pixel.
Effects - you can specify your own material FX file here. See Material FX for details.