Materials

Unigine represents its own material system: all of the materials are organized in libraries and form materials hierarchy.

A material is a set of properties (states, options, parameters) and assets (2D, 3D textures), described in a .mat text file and associated with a particular object surface. A material refers to fragment, vertex and geometry shaders, describing how the material will look like. Shaders are written in the .shader files. Two shading languages, GLSL and HLSL, are used to write shaders.

As Unigine uses its own material system, you cannot use the material provided by any third-party application. To create your own material, you need to inherit from one of the base materials and adjust it. A built-in material library is quite big and contains most of the frequently asked materials, but you can also create a brand new one.

• See the Hierarchy and Inheritance article to know more about how materials are organized
• See the Inherit a Material section to know how to inherit a material from the base one
• See the Material File Format article to know more about a material, a .mat file and its connection with the .shader file
• See the Custom Materials article to know basics of a new material creation