The Materials tab allows material properties to be set.
Name
Name of the material imported from the 3D modeling program. The name is not editable in Shapespark.
Type
The material type:
- Standard - generic type, suitable for representing most real materials
- Water - special type for representing water
- Grass - special type for representing grass
Base color
The texture or RGB value of a solid color. Controls the diffuse color of a non-metallic material or the reflection color of a metallic material.
ℹ️ By default, the base color property is linked to the corresponding property in the 3D modeling program, which means its value is imported from the 3D modeling program each time the scene is imported. When the 🔗 icon is clicked, the property gets unlinked from the 3D modeling program. Then, it can be changed in the Shapespark editor and is not altered during future imports of the scene from the 3D modeling program.
For base color texture, a Correction option is shown that allows two color correction operations to be applied to the texture:
- Contrast - Changes the contrast of the texture by scaling colors around medium gray intensity. Contrast -1 means 100% contrast reduction, which results in a gray texture; contrast 1 means that contrast is increased by 100%
- Adjustment - Adjusts the texture color in the HSL color space. Changing the hue (H) may be used, for example, to make a blue texture green. Changing the saturation (S) can make a pale blue texture vivid, and changing the lightness (L) can be used to make a dark blue texture light. The valid values of saturation (S) and lightness (L) adjustments are between -1 (complete lack of saturation or lightness) and 4 (saturation or lightness of each pixel is increased by 400%).
Opacity
Like the base color, the Opacity is linked by default to the corresponding property in the 3D modeling program, but it can be unlinked by clicking the 🔗 icon.
❕ It is important to correctly configure all transparent materials before baking the scene; in particular outside light should be able to enter interiors through windows. A good way to configure colorless glass is to set the Base color to (0, 0, 0), and the Opacity to a small value, like 0.05, which means that the glass blocks 5% of the incoming light.
Roughness
The roughness of the material. Takes effect only if at least one light probe is present in the scene.
Examples:
- 0.0 - for polished surfaces with mirror-like reflections
- 1.0 - for the roughest surfaces with no reflections
Materials with non-uniform roughness can use a roughness texture instead of a single value. The roughness texture can be imported from a file (🖺 icon). It uses the base color UV channel.
Metallic
The metallic value of the material. Takes effect only if at least one light probe is present in the scene..
Examples:
- 1.0 - for metals
- 0.0 - for everything else.
Materials that have only some parts made of metal can use a metallic texture imported with the 🖺 button. As with the roughness texture, the metallic texture uses the base color UV channel.
Parallax correction
If enabled, a light probe bounding box is used to attempt to correct the placement and size of reflections. In most cases, it should be enabled.
Emissive
Makes the material emit light with configurable Strength. Emissive materials are useful for modeling lights with non-standard shapes, such as fluorescent tubes, LED strips, or TV screens.
Bump
A texture that models bumps on a surface to increase the perceived geometry details of the surface. Bump textures modify how light is reflected, so this effect is most visible on highly reflective surfaces. Imported from a file (with 🖺 icon).
Takes effect only if at least one light probe is present in the scene.
Double-sided objects
If enabled, both sides of objects covered with a material are rendered and visible. This is useful for small objects, such as leaves, that are modeled as flat 2D surfaces but need to be visible from both sides. A lightmap for Double-sided objects is still baked only for the front side, so the double-sided setting should not be used for large surfaces where incorrect lighting of the back side is clearly visible.
UV Transform
Configure UV scale and offset for a material to adjust the UV mapping.