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.
The starter library
The Starter Library ships 14 ready-made, physically-based materials. Use the Find preset box to filter by name or category:
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.
What about plain color / roughness / metalness?
There's no separate "simple material" inspector — those values live as nodes. A base color is a Solid Color node; roughness and metalness are Scalar Value nodes. Most of the time a preset already has the look you want; when you need to fine-tune, hop into the node graph. (The AI Assistant can also set a color directly — just say "make it matte red.")