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Materials & Textures

Materials & the library

Assign a surface in one click from the starter library, manage your saved materials, and turn folders of textures into ready-made PBR packs.

Open in the interactive manual →

The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.

A material is the surface of an object: its color, shine, roughness, bumpiness. Manage them in the Material Assets panel (Windows ▸ Materials). The fastest path is the preset library; the deepest is the node graph.

Assigning a material

Select a geometry object, open Material Assets, and click a material card. Done. Each card shows its color swatches and node count, and flags whether it's Assigned to your current selection. Per-card buttons cover Edit in Graph, Assign, Rename, Duplicate, and Delete.

There's a shortcut for textures: drag an image or a PBR set out of the Asset Library and drop it straight onto an object in the viewport. 3dCMS builds the material and assigns it in one step, without you selecting anything first.

Materials go on geometry only You can assign a material to a primitive or an imported mesh. Particles, cameras, groups, and text get their color elsewhere (in their own Properties sections).

The starter library

The Starter Library ships 14 ready-made, physically-based materials. Use the Find preset box to filter by name or category:

Matte Paper Neon / Frosted Ice / Ocean Glass Brushed Metal · Gold Leaf Warm Ceramic Soft Plastic Holographic Film Dark Carbon Rough Stone · Polished Marble Worn Leather · Lava Rock

Clicking a preset adds it to your library (and assigns it if a geometry object is selected). It never overwrites the material you're editing.

One-click PBR packs from textures

If your uploads or the built-in textures folder contain a complete, channel-named set (say hardwood-albedo, hardwood_ormh, hardwood-normal), the panel detects it as a pack under "From your textures folder." Click it and 3dCMS wires up the entire material (color + the four ORMH channels + normal map) in one go, instead of building nodes by hand.

Editing a material from the object

You don't have to come here at all to change the surface of something you've selected. Properties already names the material bound to the selected object; beside it is an Edit material → button, and clicking it swaps the whole panel over to that material's own properties:

  • Its swatches and how many objects use it.
  • A Name field: rename it right there (leave it blank and it snaps back to "Material", since a nameless material is a blank row in every assignment dropdown in the app).
  • The channel controls: base colour, roughness, metalness and the rest.
  • Alpha (Opaque / Cutout / Blend) and Blend mode, which are properties of the material's output and until now were reachable only by opening the graph and clicking that node.

The way back names where back is (← Back to <object>), and selecting a different object in the viewport returns the panel to that object rather than stranding you on a material the new selection may not even use. If the material is shared, the panel says how many objects will change with it.

Imported models paint themselves On an imported GLB, the meshes carry the materials baked into the file, and only Emissive from the assigned material reaches them: base colour, roughness and metalness are ignored on that object. The panel says so above the controls it applies to. Those values still apply to any ordinary shape sharing the same material.

What about plain color / roughness / metalness?

Underneath, those values live as nodes: a base color is a Solid Color node; roughness and metalness are Scalar Value nodes. The channel controls above are a friendly face on exactly those nodes, so most edits never need the graph. Most of the time a preset already has the look you want. When you need the parts a knob can't express, hop into the node graph. (The AI Assistant can also set a color directly. Just say "make it matte red.")

Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Email hello@3dcms.info.