Material Editor
A material decides how a surface looks: its colour, how shiny or rough it is, whether it glows. You build one by connecting nodes rather than writing code.
Dressing an object without the graph
Most of the time you never need the node editor at all. Select an object and open the Material section in the Inspector.
The material slot
The top row shows which material the object uses: a preview square and the material's name with its folder underneath.
Click the field to open a searchable grid of the project's materials, each as a preview tile. Hover a tile to see which folder it is in.
An object with no material shows a New material button, which asks for a name and a destination folder, writes the file and binds it.
Base Color
A built-in shape does not start with a material. It wears the blockout grid tinted by a single colour, which is why a fresh cube is solid red and a sphere solid blue.
That colour is the Base Color row directly under the material slot. Click the swatch for a picker, and the object updates as you drag. It is saved with the scene.
The row only appears on built-in shapes with no material. Assign a material and it goes away, because from then on the material owns the surface. Imported models never show it.
Alpha works here, so dropping it below 1 switches the object to blended transparency.
This is the fast way to dress a greybox: spawn the shapes, colour them, and only reach for real materials on the surfaces that need them.
Texture slots
Once an object has a material, one row per channel appears: Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, Ambient Occlusion, Emissive and Displacement.
Only Base Color shows to start with. A footer beneath counts the rest and unfolds them when clicked.
Drag an image onto a row, or click the row to browse, and it is wired into the material graph for you. The mesh updates immediately.
A filled row carries two buttons:
- The eye turns that channel off on the mesh without giving the texture up. Use it to see a mesh without its normal map, or to check what a roughness map is contributing. Muting is stored in the material, so it applies anywhere that material is used.
- The ✕ unwires the channel for real.
Dropping a whole texture set
Drag several images at once onto the material slot and each is routed by its filename. rock_normal.png goes to Normal, rock_rough.png to Roughness, rock_basecolor.png to Base Color, rock_height.png to Displacement.
If the object has no material yet, dropping on the slot creates one named after the object with the images already wired in.
DirectX and OpenGL normal maps
Texture packs often ship both, a _NormalDX and a _NormalGL. They hold the same data with the green channel inverted, and the engine decodes the OpenGL convention, so reach for the GL file.
If you only have the DX one, tick Flip Green (DirectX) on the Sample Normal Map node.
Getting this wrong does not look broken so much as subtly off: bumps light as though they were dents, and only along one axis, so it tends to show up when the light moves rather than at first glance.
The node graph
Switch to the Materials workspace, then click a mesh in the viewport to load its material, or double-click a .material file in the Assets panel.
Changes save as you work and the mesh updates live. Ctrl+S forces a save.
Wiring
Drag from a node's output dot on its right edge into another node's input dot on the left. Anything you leave unconnected uses the value typed into the node.
Dots are coloured by pin type, and numeric types interconnect freely. A wire between two different colours draws as a gradient, so you can see where a conversion is happening. Only genuinely incompatible pins refuse to connect.
Math nodes adapt to their wires. A Math node starts as a plain float, but wire a four-component value into one input and the whole node follows. The widest wire wins, and unplugging it drops the node back down. Adaptation only flows from what feeds the node, never from what consumes its result.
Adding nodes
Right-click the graph, or press Space with the cursor over it, for a searchable palette at the cursor. Type to filter and press Enter to take the first match.
You can also drag a cable off a pin and release on empty space. The palette opens and the node you pick is wired to that pin automatically.
Drag an image straight from the Assets panel onto the graph and you get a Sample Texture node with that image already bound.
The palette only offers nodes the material's domain can use. A Sprite material has no Scene Depth, Scene Normal, Scene Color, Motion Vectors or Environment Map, since a sprite is not drawn in a 3D view, and a 3D material has no Sprite Color. A node like that arriving some other way, pasted in or saved by an older version, gets a red header saying why, and wires to or from it are refused.
Moving nodes
A dragged node snaps its top-left corner to the dots of the background grid. Hold Alt while dragging to place it freely.
Editing values
Every input pin that is not wired shows its editor right under the pin: a scrub field for numbers, X/Y/Z fields for vectors, a colour swatch, a checkbox. Wire a cable in and the editor disappears, because the wire is supplying the value now.
The Material panel on the left is the same values in list form, with one labelled row per pin. Useful when a node's pins are not obvious, or when you are zoomed out too far to read the node.
Comments
Select some nodes and press C to wrap them in a labelled box. Dragging the box moves everything inside it. Comments are visual only and saved with the material.
The Surface Output node
This is what shows up on your mesh. The pins you will reach for most:
| Pin | What it does |
|---|---|
| Base Color | The main colour or texture |
| Metallic | 0 for non-metal, 1 for metal |
| Roughness | 0 is mirror-smooth, 1 is fully matte |
| Normal | A normal map, for surface bumps and detail |
| Displacement | A height map, for real parallax |
| Emissive | Makes a surface glow |
A minimal material only needs Base Color. Everything you leave unplugged keeps its default.
There are more advanced pins too: clearcoat for car paint, transmission for glass and water, anisotropy for brushed metal. See the Material API.
Displacement
Plug in a height map and the surface gets real parallax. Bricks occlude their own mortar, and the relief shifts correctly as you move around it.
White is the peak and black the valley, which is how every PBR texture set ships its height map, so it goes straight in with nothing to invert.
Displacement Scale sets how deep the effect reads. 0.05 is a good starting point, and much past 0.1 starts to swim at grazing angles.
Two things to know: the mesh needs tangents, which imported models have and primitive shapes do not, and this is a shading trick rather than geometry, so the silhouette does not change. A constant typed into the pin does nothing, because parallax needs a map to march through.
Node categories
There are around 150 node types. You do not need to learn them all.
| Category | Holds |
|---|---|
| Input | UVs, time, world position, vertex colours |
| Texture | Sample an image, a normal map, or triplanar projection |
| Math and Vector | Add, multiply, blend, and the other building blocks |
| Color | Palettes, fresnel rim glow, hue shifts, blends |
| Procedural | Noise, checkerboard, brick and other patterns with no texture needed |
| Animation | Scroll UVs, wind sway, flipbook frames |
The complete catalogue is in the Material Node Reference.
Domains
Every material has a domain that decides what it is for. Pick this when you create the graph.
| Domain | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Surface | Props, walls, characters. Standard PBR, and the default. |
| Terrain Layer | A paintable layer on terrain |
| Vegetation | Surfaces that sway in the wind |
| Unlit | Flat colour with no lighting |
| Sprite | A 2D sprite. Made with Add ▸ Sprite Material; see Sprite materials |
The domain is stored in the .material file, so one file type covers them all. In the Assets panel a Sprite material's thumbnail is the sample sprite wearing it, tagged 2D in the corner, where a 3D material shows a sphere.
Two more switches live on the material rather than on a node:
Alpha mode is Opaque by default, Mask for cut-out edges like leaves and fences, or Blend for glass and smoke.
Double sided renders back faces too, which thin surfaces like paper and foliage need.
Previewing
The Material Preview panel shows the material on a test shape, lit by an environment map, so you can judge it without hunting for a surface in your scene.
A Sprite material is shown instead on a flat sample sprite over a checkerboard, so changes to colour, transparency and UVs are all visible. It follows every edit live, the mouse wheel zooms, and the moon/sun button switches the checkerboard between dark and light.
Imported models
When you import a model, every material on it is written out as a .material beside the model. Those extracted graphs are what the engine renders, in the editor and in an exported game alike.
The model file itself holds no reference to them. The link is rebuilt each time the model spawns, by matching each mesh's material name to the .material of that name. Renaming a .material file breaks that link and the mesh falls back to whatever the source file said. Edit the graph, not the filename.
This matters most for models exported from the older specular-glossiness workflow, common on asset sites. The engine converts those on import, and the converted result lives only in the .material. Re-import a model if its look ever regresses to flat white.
A spec-gloss model imported before 2026-10-19 has its glossiness routed through a maths node in each graph, which renders correctly but costs a generated shader per material. Re-importing it bakes the glossiness into a real roughness texture instead, so its materials become plain StandardMaterials, and surfaces whose specular is black (brick, plaster) come out matte as authored.
Supported image formats
png, jpg, jpeg, bmp, tga, webp, hdr, exr, ktx2 and dds.