Getting started
Studio Navigation
Design process
Sharing and embedding
How to add color or material to the object
All the settings for Colors, Materials, and Environments can be found on the right panel.
Where to start:
- Select object.
- In the right panel go to Library icon to select a pre-defined material from the Material Library.
- Use the Basic and Advance property in the Basic settings to change the color and customize the material.
Use Material picker to copy any material on the scene.
Basic Materials Settings
Color
It is used for changing the color of the material. There are two different ways to do it: use the mouse or simply adjust the values.
Adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness. Color pick any color in the scene or paste in the specific value. You can switch between HEX or RGB values.
It is also possible to switch between different color modes - solid colors and gradients and also import animated materials, Figma frames or custom textures.
It is important to understand that color works differently in 3D than it does in 2D. Because an object's color is affected by the lighting. That's why in 3D it's not just color, it's diffuse color.
Roughness
Roughness controls how matte or glossy the material will be.
0 β maximum glossy 100 β maximum matt
Roughness greatly affects metallicity and vice versa. Below you can see two sets of spheres with different roughness. All spheres of the upper row have zero metallicity. While all the lower spheres have maximum metallicity.
Metalness
Metalness controls the metalness of a material. This way we can increase or decrease the metallic look.
0 β non-metallic material (dielectric) 100 β maximally metallic
100% metalness and 0% roughness is a mirror.
Opacity
0 β completely invisible 100 β fully visible
This property can work with a texture that can make an object partially transparent. This requires the use of a black and white opacity map, in which the black parts of the map represent the parts where the texture is transparent.
Emission
Adding emission to material causes it to appear as a visible source of light. It is best used with bloom effects under scene settings to change the color and intensity of the light the surface emits. If you want to make your objects really bright, explore values higher than 100.
The less light in the scene, the more noticeable the emission of light will be.
Normal map
Normal map is used for simulating shadows on uneven surfaces, grooves, or dents. It creates a more detailed texture to the object without increasing its polygons.
This property only works in texture import mode. Therefore, you will need a normal map. Such maps are available in some library materials, or you can create them yourself or find them on the web.
Links to various useful resources are in our Discord.
Import own texture
You can import your own texture maps for each of the properties. The image can be downloaded from the computer 1
and from the link 2
:
You can adjust the texture with hue, saturation, brightness and contrast.
Under the transformation menu, you can set tiling, offset, rotation and resolution.
Advanced Materials Settings
In advanced material settings are properties such as subsurface, refraction, clearcote, thinfilm and reflectivity, ambient occlusion, lightmap, double sided.
Subsurface
Subsurface scattering is important for realistic results, being necessary for the rendering of materials such as marble, skin, leaves, wax, milk, and others. It simulates light penetrating the surface of the object. If subsurface scattering is not implemented, the material may look unnatural, like plastic or metal. It's important to notice that a light source plays a big part in the end look of this material. With Radius you can then control how deep the light goes into the object.
Refraction
Refraction is a redirection of light that passes through the objects. In reality, you can observe this effect mostly on objects made out of glass, acrylic glass or water. Usually, it's either a value of 0 or 100. For best results, it's not recommended to combine it with the Subsurface.
The second parameter controls IOR (The Index of Refraction) is a value used to specify the way that light is scattered as it passes through a material.). You can control it with thickness parameter. If you want to add some color to the refractive material, add an Absorption color.
Use the Roughness property to make frosted glass.
Absorption
Absorption value is distance between the object's surface and start of the absorption. For stronger effect, set lower value.
Thickness
Thickness is a parameter that defines the thickness of the object. If you have a window with 2mm glass, you should set Thickness to value 2.
Thin-film
Known under names such as iridescent material or pearlescent material. Iridescence is the phenomenon of certain surfaces that appear to gradually change color as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes. Examples of iridescence include soap bubbles, feathers, oil slick.
Its best to use objects with more complex surfaces so there is a big area to do its magic. Play with its value, but best result are usually under value 100. To change its color, click on the color icon and adjust the gradient. The top color in the gradient represents the vector pointing towards the camera, the bottom value in the gradient represents the vector pointing outside of the camera.
The effect is best seen at 100% metallicity or 100 refraction.
Clearcoat
It can be usually found on surfaces such car paint. Basically, itβs an extra layer of lacquer on top of the existing material. It can add extra depth to the color plus some additional shines. Achieve interesting results by modifying its roughness separately from the roughness of the material in its basic settings.
Reflectivity
Reflectivity is a value of how reflective the object is. Most realistic materials use 100% reflectivity.
Ambient occlusion
The ambient occlusion map is an image in shades of gray, with white indicating areas that should receive full indirect light and black indicating no indirect light.
Lightmap
Lightmap Is adding more light and shadow to the scene to create a more realistic effect. It can only be used with the map.
Double-sided material
By default, material is only displayed on one side. This option enables the display of material on both sides. Be aware that enabling double-sided material also decreases the performance.
Texture transformation
You can customize each texture separately, or you can do it all at once: set the tiling, offset, and rotation.
Texture Projection
A texture is a 2D image that can be "stretched" over a three-dimensional object in various ways. So if you see that the texture is not distributed correctly on the object, you can fix it.
With Texture Projection, you can choose the shape in which the texture is projected onto the object. You can also manually transform, move and rotate this projection with Gizmo.
Click the projection shape icon several times to change its plane in space.
On this page