To simulate a surface material, VIZ offers preset material libraries. These are libraries of simulated materials that you can assign to objects. Each material contains properties such as color, reflectance, transparency, and roughness. Many materials also use images, or bitmaps, to simulate the look of complex surfaces such as marble, wood, or brick. Other materials use procedural maps, which are a bit like mathematical simulations of the actual material.

A bitmap is an image file composed of pixels that shows a graphic sample of the material. One common bitmap image is marble; another is brick. You might think of a material that uses bitmaps as a kind of decal or sticker that is placed on a surface. You can use bitmaps in the properties of a material in several ways: texture maps, bump maps, opacity maps, specular maps, shininess maps, self- illumination maps, and reflection maps, to name a few. Diffuse maps are the most common use of bitmaps and are the easiest to understand.

Procedural maps use mathematical formulas instead of bitmap images to simulate a texture. Unlike bitmaps, procedural maps often have parameters that can be set to control their visual effects; they also have a more uniform appearance when applied to objects that have unusual shapes or that are sliced or cut open in some way. For example, you can use the wood procedural map to create an elaborate carved wood sculpture,...