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How to add or change the material:

Each object can have many materials, you can easily switch between them:

1 - create new material for the object

2 - duplicate already created material

3 - 🔥 copy material from another object with eyedropper

4 - delete the material

You can set the color using standard methods: select a color from the palette, insert a color code, or use the dropper. The HEX and RGB color models are available.

There are different color modes - solid color or gradient. And you can also use textures (png/jpg/svg) and even animated textures (gif/lottie) instead of colors and import images directly from Figma:

Roughness controls how matte or glossy the material will be.

0 — maximum glossy 100 — 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.

This property determines how metallic the material will be.

0 — non-metallic material (dielectric) 100 — maximally metallic

With this property, an object can be made transparent or partially transparent.

You can also use a texture for this property, which can make the object transparent only in some parts of it.

To do this, you must use a black-and-white opacity map, in which black is responsible for transparency.

0 — completely invisible 100 — fully visible

There are two methods: Blend and Mask. The Mask method allows non-transparent areas to cast a shadow. In addition, this mode is preferred for better performance.

Invert — Inverts the texture colors, white becomes black, and vice versa.

Adding emission to a material makes it appear as a source of visible light. You can change the color of the emission and its intensity. The less light in the scene, the more visible the emission of light will be.

A 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.

You can import your own texture maps for each of the properties.

The image can be downloaded from computer 1 and from 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.

In advanced material settings are properties such as subsurface, refraction, clearcoat, thinfilm and reflectivity, ambient occlusion, lightmap, double sided.

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 is a redirection of light that passes through 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 the thickness parameter. If you want to add some color to the refractive material, add an Absorption color.

Absorption

Absorption value is the distance between the object's surface and the start of the absorption. For a stronger effect, set a 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 the Thickness to value 2.

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.

It’s best to use objects with more complex surfaces so there is a big area to do its magic. Play with its value, but the best result is 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 toward the camera, and the bottom value in the gradient represents the vector pointing outside of the camera.

This property simulates a material with a transparent top coat, like lacquer or car paint. It helps to give extra depth of color and shine.

Reflectivity is the value of how reflective the object is. Most realistic materials use 100% reflectivity.

By default, the material is only displayed on one side. This option enables the display of material on both sides.

Ambient occlusion (AO) is the generation of additional shadows that are added in places of curvature and uneven parts of the geometry (recesses, etc.).

To get these shadows, there are three ways:

Lightmap (LM) is a texture on which the light information is baked. Accordingly, if there is no light in the scene, all the objects will be black, but the object with the Lightmap will be visible, as its map informs the renderer of the light.

The Lightmap texture considers the environment light, local light sources and material properties of each object in the scene.

This map can be created (baked) directly in Vectary. Read more about this below.

Texture Baking is the process of saving (or transferring) calculated information onto a texture (image).

Baking takes some time because it applies a rendering method based on path tracing, resulting in high, physically correct quality.

What are the benefits?

Performance

Texture Baker allows you to turn off the Ambient Occlusion effect, and reduce or eliminate the use of light sources altogether. Thereby, providing much better performance, because there won’t be a need to render it in realtime.

Realism

Using the photorealistic path trace rendering method, offers impressive results with a single click.

Bake settings

Unwrap UV1 — this is the parameter to generate an UV1. If this option is not activated, but the object does not have an UV1, the UV1 will be created anyway.

Use UV0 — this parameter is needed to link AO + LM textures with other textures (Color, Roughness, etc.). This will allow all the textures to be engaged when you change the texture projection.

Textures using UV0:

- Color

- Roughness

- Metalness

- Opacity

- Emission

- Normal

- Thickness

Textures using UV1 (but UV0 can be forcibly used instead):

  - Ambient Occlusion

- Lightmap

UV0 in most cases does not match the shape of the object.

UV1 is the exact opposite. UV1 fully matches the shape of the object, so the object must be unwrapped for AO and LM to work properly.

It will almost always be better to keep UV0 and UV1 separate, in order to adjust the texture projection separately.

Resolution — the texture resolution.

Auto — this option determines the resolution of each object in the scene relative to the largest object.

Quality — the texture quality. This parameter determines the number of samples to render. The more samples, the longer it takes to render the texture.

Draft: 16 samples Medium: 256 samples High: 1024 samples

Denoise — enables noise removal for texture rendering.

You can customize each texture separately, or you can do it all at once: set the tiling, offset, and rotation.

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.

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