TIP: It is rare for an object to use all of the Material node's parameters at the same time. Just specifying an overall diffuseColor is easy and gives good results. Adding specular highlights by specifying a white specularColor and adjusting the shininess field will suffice for most objects. Alternatively, you can specify a black diffuseColor and simply use emissiveColor to get full-intensity, glowing objects. If an object is purely emissive (specularColor and diffuseColor are both black), then implementations do not need to perform lighting calculations for the object at all.

Partially transparent objects can be used to create a lot of great effects. For example, very nice smoke and fire effects can be created using semitransparent, animated triangles. Unfortunately, not all systems support partial transparency, so if you want your world to be viewed by the largest number of people you should stay away from transparency values other than 0.0 (completely opaque) and 1.0 (completely transparent).

Perhaps the greatest frustration for content creators with VRML 1.0 was creating scenes that would look good on all of the various VRML browsers. Varying capabilities of the underlying rendering libraries and different interpretations of the incomplete specification resulted in vastly different appearances for identical scenes. These problems are addressed in VRML 2.0 in several different ways.

First, ideal lighting equations are given, and the interaction between lights, materials, and textures are well defined (see Section 2.14, Lighting Model). The VRML 1.0 specification was vague about what the ideal, correct scene would look like once rendered; VRML 2.0 is very precise. Implementations will still be forced to approximate the ideal due to hardware and software limitations, but at least now all implementations will be aiming at the same target, and results can be judged against the ideal.

VRML 1.0 allowed multiple materials to be specified in a Material node and allowed the materials to be applied to each face or vertex of shapes. VRML 2.0 allows only a single Material node, but also allows specification of multiple diffuse colors for each vertex or face, restricting the feature to a simple, common case.

The ambientColor field of VRML 1.0 is replaced by the VRML 2.0 ambientIntensity field. Specifying what fraction of the diffuse color should be visible due to ambient light is simpler and better matches the capabilities of most interactive renderers. Specifying the ambient reflected color as a fraction of the reflected diffuse color also works much better with texture colors and per-face/per-vertex colors, which are both treated as diffuse colors. It would be very strange to see texture in the lighted parts of a textured object but see nothing but the ambient color in the unlit parts of the object.

However, even with these changes, color fidelity will continue to be a problem for content creators. Three-dimensional rendering libraries and hardware are a new feature for inexpensive computers and there will continue to be fairly large variations between different implementations. Differences in display hardware--monitors and video cards--can result in different colors being displayed on different machines even if the VRML browser makes exactly the same lighting calculations and puts exactly the same value in the frame buffer. As standards for color reproduction on computer displays develop and as 3D graphics hardware and software on inexpensive machines mature, the situation will gradually improve. However, it is likely to be several years before it will be practical to decide what color you will paint your house by applying virtual paint to a virtual house and judging the color as it appears on your computer screen.