The RedSDK Editor lets you create, save and edit realistic-based materials. If the material is pre-existing, or loaded from a *.red custom file you will have a limited set of options specific to that material.

If you are working with a new, default material, you will have access to the full set of options in the RedSDK editor.

These realistic materials are intended to produce good-looking materials with a minimal set of parameters while being still able to simulate various real-life surfaces.
The RedSDK editor summarizes the physical interactions between light and surface in three groups of parameters:

Diffusion: controls the amount of light reaching the surface that will be reflected equally in all directions
Reflection: controls the amount of light reaching the surface that will be reflected in a cone around the perfect reflection direction
Transmission: controls the amount of light reaching the surface that will be transmitted through it

In real life, the sum of all these three components should be equal to or less than '1'.. Absorption is not modeled as it is the implicit complement to '1' of the sum of the three other quantities.
The realistic material embeds an energy preservation rule to guarantee the above requirement while not pushing to many limitations on the user. It takes the form of a priority rule which is applied to the three material main components like follows:

The reflection component takes over the two others.
The transmission component is attenuated by the complement to '1' of the reflection one.
The diffusion component is attenuated by the complement to '1' of the sum of the two others (1 - reflection – (attenuated transmission) )

For more flexibility, anisotropy (directionally dependent appearance) support and Fresnel effect (reflectance as a function of the viewing angle) have been added to the realistic shading model.
Hence, this all-in-one model is suited for all kinds of real-life materials modeling.
The RedSDK editor gives a complete but readable view of the realistic material. The panels at the right of the screen provide access to the material parameters while the rest of the application window interactively displays the current material.
Each material main component has a common basic representation.

The user can choose between two kinds of input:

constant color
texture map

To switch between inputs a check box is used. If it is checked, the texture map is used, if not, the color is used instead.

To maintain a compact interface, the texture map parameters panel is shared among the material components and is located at the bottom of the panel to the right. To enable the panel, below the Transmission area of the Editor, click on the texture map button (default text is "None") at the right of the check box.

Using that panel, you can browse for a texture map file (supported file formats are JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP), select the texture map coordinates channel to be used, and apply transformation to that texture map coordinates (translation, rotation, scaling).
In the cases of reflection, transmission and bump, more parameters are available.

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