Making things look right
Slots
A material is a list of slots, not one material. Slot order follows the submeshes of an imported model — slot 1 paints the first group, slot 2 the second. That is how one chair can be wood and fabric.
| Action | Does |
|---|---|
| + Add material | adds a standard slot |
| Edit | open this slot in the editor |
| Replace from library | pick a saved material |
| Duplicate | copy the slot |
| Delete | remove it — unavailable when only one is left |
Drag to reorder. There is always at least one slot.
Choosing a type
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Standard | the default — realistic surfaces via metalness and roughness |
| Physical | standard plus clearcoat, transmission, thickness and refraction |
| Basic | flat colour that ignores lighting |
| Toon | stylised banded shading |
| Normal | surface-normal colouring, for debugging |
| Chromakey | video with a colour keyed out — a green screen |
| Occluder | invisible, but hides whatever is behind it |
The panel only shows fields the chosen type actually has, so switching type changes what you see.
The fields
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | so you can tell slots apart |
| Side | front, back or double — which faces are drawn |
| Colour | the base colour, with a swatch for its texture |
| Alpha | switches transparency on |
| Opacity | 0–100%, with a swatch for an opacity texture |
| Roughness | 0–100% — 0 is mirror-smooth, 100 is completely matte |
| Metalness | 0–100% — realistically this is 0 or 100, rarely between |
| Emissive | colour and intensity of light the surface gives off by itself |
If a surface looks wrong, adjust roughness before anything else. Metalness is close to binary in reality: a thing either is bare metal or it is not, and values in between mostly look like mistakes.
Chroma key has its own block: the source video, the colour to remove, and how aggressively — similarity, smoothness and spill, all as percentages.
Preview shows the material on a test object, which is much easier to judge than a small swatch.
Textures
The swatch next to a field opens the texture picker: choose an image, a texture or a video, then tune how it sits on the surface.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Repeat, offset, centre | how the image tiles and where it sits |
| Rotation | −180° to 180° |
| Wrap | repeat, clamp or mirror at the edges |
| Magnify / minify filter | how it is sampled up close and far away |
| Anisotropy | 1–16 — sharpness at grazing angles |
| Mipmaps | generate smaller versions for distance |
| Colour space | how the image's values are interpreted |
| UV channel | which set of coordinates to use, 0–3 |
| Flip Y, premultiplied alpha | orientation and transparency handling |
A map carrying numbers rather than colour (roughness, a mask, a height map) has to be marked as data, or it is colour-corrected and the values come out wrong. → Materials
Two behaviours to expect: a ready-made texture resource has read-only settings, and if the object has a Video component, that video takes over the colour map and the picker is locked.
The material library
Replace from library opens the saved materials:
| Tab | Holds |
|---|---|
| Project | materials saved in this project |
| Team | your team's shared materials |
| Creators hub | platform templates |
Picking a library material copies its values into your slot. Editing it afterwards changes only this object — the library material is untouched, and so are other objects using it.
If you want one material shared across many objects, use a material reference instead, so editing it once updates everything.
Next: Events editor