Articles on: Editing

Materials - What & How to use?

What are Materials?

Materials can be seen as layers or paint that are added on the surface of your 3D model to them appear metallic or wooden.

How to create a New material?

To create a New Material, click + Material in your product page. This will add a material to your Product Assets.

How to make change to a Material?

Click and select a Material to open a tab with all its values.

By adjusting these values, you can change the material color or make appear metallic.

Material values do not add any data to your product so we recommend using them over textures

RGBA Color picker

RGBA Color picker changes Material to any RGBA color. It can be used in combination with a Texture to fine tune a colour or to reuse texture asset.

Material colours work in combination with the environment lighting so they might not translate 1:1 in all cases

Factor & Intensity

Factor & Intensity effect the material on a scale from 0 to 1. When used with a Texture, it will reduce texture efficient.

Roughness factor: Makes your material rough (1) or glossy (0).
Metalness factor: Makes your material metallic (1) or not metallic (0).
Normal intensity: Reduces the intensity of your Normal map (0 = no texture).
Occlusion intensity: Reduces the intensity of your Normal map (0 = no texture).

How assign a Texture to a Material?

Drag & drop asset file to the image icon in a Material value to upload it and assign it.

To assign uploaded Textures (listed in Product Textures), click the image icon in a Material and select a Texture.

How to assign Material to a Node?

Drag & drop material icon to a Node in the scene. If you drag it to a Group, it will assign it to all Nodes in that group.

You can also select a Node and then choose Material from the dropdown to assign it.

PBR Materials values

The Sayduck Platform uses Physically Based Rendering (PBR), a shading and rendering technique that accurately calculates how light interacts with the surface, to achieve a higher level of realism and quality in our materials.

Base color (RGBA)

Base color is used to add solid color (RGB) or transparency (A ie. alpha value).

To learn more: https://help.sayduck.com/en/article/base-colour-rgba-1nwixxk/

Metalness

Metalness defines how metallic your Material is.

To learn more: https://help.sayduck.com/en/article/metalness-1btn4gj/

Roughness

Roughness defines how light reflects from your Material.

To learn more: https://help.sayduck.com/en/article/roughness-2t9z1a/

Normal map

Normal map is used to add details such as bumps or dents without effecting the model structure.

To learn more: https://help.sayduck.com/en/article/normal-map-1cnck3i/

Emission

Emission simulates glow and is mainly used for lights.

To learn more:

Ambient occlusion

Ambient occlusion is a rendering technique used to creates contact shadows or shading to your product.

This AO shadow texture are baked in a 3D modelling software and then uploaded to the Platform.

Transparency

Transparency can be added to your product with Alpha value, Transparent texture (png) or with Transmission extension

Alpha value

Alpha value can be adjusted from the RGBA picker. It will makes your model appear transparent by fading the base color.

When using a Transparent texture (png), you can enable opacity in a texture with the Use transparency.

Transparent texture will use PNG format which will add more data to your product.

Transmission

Transmission emulate transparent materials with more realistic reflections and color.

Not supported in Augmented reality

Index of refraction (IOR)

Refraction refers to the effect in which light to bend when pass through different transparent materials. It is because of this that objects behind transparent material look distorted.

Not supported in Augmented reality

Volume

Volume simulates the thickness of the transparent object. Increasing thickness will further distort the object behind the transparent material.

Not supported in Augmented reality

Clear Coat

Clear Coat is a material extension that adds a thin reflective layer on top of your model. It is mainly used for transparent coating on wood furniture or car paint.

This effect can be adjusted with the Intensity (factor & grayscale texture), Roughness (factor & grayscale texture) and Normal map.

Not supported in Augmented reality

Sheen

Sheen is an extensions that adds glow to your material when viewed from an angle. It is mainly used for fabrics materials, such as velvet, as it simulate how threads responds to light when viewed from different angles.

Not supported in Augmented reality

Transform

Transform is used to repeat, move or rotate Textures applied to the material.

Tiling repeats the Texture asset based on the value added to the X and Y.

Offset moves Texture in the Y and X axes.

Rotation changes the angle of your Texture.

Occlusion map is not effected by Transform values