Autodesk 12812-051462-9011 User Guide 3 - Page 236

Balls using raytrace material to reflect each other Raytrace material is an advanced surface shading material. It supports the same kinds of diffuse surface shading that a standard material does. It can also create fully raytraced reflections and refractions. It also supports fog, color density, translucency on page 8158, fluorescence on page 7984, and other special effects. The reflections and refractions Raytrace material generates are more accurate than those produced by the Reflect/Refract on page 5964 map. Rendering raytraced objects can be slower than using Reflect/Refract. On the other hand, Raytrace is optimized for rendering 3ds Max scenes. You can further optimize it for your scene by excluding specific objects from raytracing. NOTE If you want accurate, raytraced reflections or refractions in a standard material you can use the Raytrace map on page 5952, which uses the same raytracer. The Raytrace map and material share global parameter settings. IMPORTANT Raytrace map and Raytrace material use a surface's normal to decide whether a ray is entering or exiting a surface. If you flip the normals of an object, you can get unexpected results. Making the material 2-Sided doesn't correct the problem as it often does with reflections and refractions in Standard materials. In some cases, the colors in the Basic Parameters rollout of Raytrace material behave differently from colors in standard materials. Standard material has a diffuse shading model that does an excellent job of rendering solid, nonreflective objects such as plastic, ceramic, and so on. In effect, this model applies color to the object. The color components in Raytrace material, on the other hand, attempt to model their physical counterparts in nature. Raytrace Material | 5491