Material Editor

A Material controls how a 3D surface responds to light. For a painted crate, begin with a base color and rough surface, then add textures after the solid-color version renders correctly.

Prerequisites

Use a 3D project and show Advanced resources. Prepare a visible primitive or imported Model and a runtime Camera. Add a Material in the Resource Tree and open it.

Build and Assign a Surface

1. Choose a preset as a starting point, or edit Base and Surface directly. Set a recognizable base color so assignment is visible.
2. Set opacity and choose the transparency mode. Opaque permits opacity fading; Cutout uses binary alpha; Blend uses texture alpha.
3. Adjust the surface’s metallic and roughness controls. Compare a rough nonmetal surface with a smooth metallic one under the same light.
4. Add texture resources through the offered pickers. Change Tiling only after checking the model’s UV layout.
5. Assign the Material through the primitive’s Material field or the Model’s material override controls. Save, reopen, and run the Scene.

Keep imported Model materials and your reusable Material separate. A material override changes the assigned surface; it does not rewrite your original art file. Check the intended mesh or material slot when a Model has several surfaces.

Read the Texture Controls

Base textures supply color. Detail maps change surface response. Ambient occlusion reads the red channel: white is open and black is occluded. A packed ORM image can also supply the metal/roughness slot. Selecting UV1 requires geometry with secondary UV coordinates; the picker does not create them.

Glow controls emission. A bright emission value is separate from a Light Emitter, which lights other Objects. Stylized shading includes Physical (PBR), Toon (Banded Light), and Gradient (Height Tint). Check each under the actual Scene environment because illumination and tone mapping affect the result.

Custom Shader accepts a compatible 3D surface Shader. It does not accept every screen or Sprite effect. The picker identifies an incompatible saved reference so you can replace it with the right Shader kind.

Expected result: changing the assigned Material changes the test surface in Game View and playtest. With a color-only baseline, you can tell whether a later issue comes from assignment, textures, lighting, or the Shader.

Troubleshooting

If nothing changes, check the Object’s Material reference and any more specific mesh override. If the surface is black, inspect lights, environment, texture availability, and metallic response. If a transparent surface draws in the wrong order, compare Cutout and Blend and test overlapping geometry.

If textures stretch or repeat incorrectly, inspect UVs and Tiling. If UV1 looks wrong, verify that the source model has a second UV set. If a Shader is unavailable, use the correct surface context and inspect its compile diagnostics.

See Models, Shaders, and lighting for the connected workflows.