Setting Up Materials

Preview Panel and Material Tree

The left part of the Materials panel consists of the following elements:

Preview panel — display the current material over the geometric figure, selected in the drop-down list: box, sphere or dodecahedron.
Save materials — save the material.
Clone material — clone the selected material. The new material file will be created.
Inherit material — inherit the selected material. The new material file will be created.
Rename material — rename the material. Renaming the material leads to renaming the material file.
Remove material — remove material and all its children. Removing material leads to removing the material files.
Assign material — assign material to one selected surface of the selected node.
Search — search material in the hierarchy list by name.
Materials hierarchy list — hierarchically structured list of the materials giving material names and parent-child links. It enables showing only the parent materials and hide the child ones if necessary.

The material-related data is grouped into four tabs:

The Common tab contains common material settings. These properties are the same for all materials.
The States tab contains a set of flags that will be used for a shader corresponding to the material.
The Textures tab contains paths to textures used by the material.
The Parameters tab contains parameters associated with the selected states.

Details on type dependent properties can be found in Material Class article.

The common tab has the following options:

This section provides the information about the selected material:

Name	A name of the material.
Parent	A name of the parent material.
Children	The number of child materials.

This section contains transparency settings:

Preset	Blending presets. One of the following can be selected: Opaque Alpha test Alpha blend Additive Multiplicative Custom
Src	Option used to scale the source color (the color of an overlaying material). Available only when Custom preset is selected.
Dest	Option used to scale the destination color (the color of an obscured material). Available only when Custom preset is selected.
Overlap	Render polygons, to which the material is applied, on the top of the render. This can be used for UI elements.

This section contains common material options:

Rendering order	Sort order used by rendering transparent objects with alpha blending. Transparent objects should be set lowest order numbers and thus rendered first, while opaque objects should be set highest order numbers to be rendered last. Notice In order to control the rendering order, you need to set Materials settings -> States tab -> Ambient pass to Transparent for the selected material.
Polygon offset	Polygon offset level used for the material.
Shadow mask	A shadow mask of the material.
Viewport mask	A viewport mask that allows to selectively render materials and reflections from them. (See the detailed info).
Two sided	Render polygons, to which the material is applied, two times by lighting pass.
Cast shadow	Render polygons, to which the material is applied, casting shadows from omni, projected or cubemap light sources.
Cast world shadow	Render polygons, to which the material is applied, casting shadows from world light sources.
Depth test	Enable or disable depth testing for the material. This can be used to make objects occluded by others visible (e.g. a character behind a wall).
Copy settings	Copy all material settings.
Paste settings	Apply the previously copied settings of the material to the current one.

Last update: 2017-12-21

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