Basic materials

There are two types of basic materials. These are:

• Wireframe materials

• Color materials

We consider them as basic materials because their practical use is limited. Other materials offer more functionalities and are often more useful while working on real-world projects. These will be discussed after we have seen how to apply a wireframe and color as material.

Wireframe material

All examples we've seen so far used wireframe material. Papervision3D sets this as the default material type for most objects. It draws lines between all the vertices that form the triangles of a 3D object. This comes in handy for debugging purposes because it visualizes how the triangles are drawn at runtime. Although it might sound like a lightweight material, it is actually quite heavy to render. It makes use of Flash's line drawing, which is a relatively slow operation.

By default, a wireframe material is generated when working with primitives. However, we can create a wireframe material by hand...