Materials & Lighting
Give your objects color, shine, and glow, and set the mood of the scene around them.
What a material controls
Every object has a material — a small bundle of settings that decides how it reacts to light. Select an object and open the Mat tab (or the Properties panel) to edit it. You don't need to understand the physics to use it — here's what each slider actually looks like in practice:
| Property | Plain-language meaning |
|---|---|
| Base Color | The object's main color. |
| Roughness | Low = polished and shiny (like a bowling ball). High = matte and dull (like chalk or cloth). |
| Metallic | Off = a normal painted/plastic surface. On = looks like bare metal, tinted by the base color. |
| Emissive | Makes the object glow with its own light — useful for lamps, screens, or sci-fi panels — independent of scene lighting. |
| Alpha Mode | Whether the object is fully solid, uses cutout transparency (like a leaf texture), or blends smoothly (like glass). |
Try a few combinations: low roughness + metallic on looks like chrome; high roughness + metallic off looks like rubber or fabric.
Textures
Instead of a flat color, a material's slots (base color, roughness, metallic, normal, emissive) can each use an image texture for more detail — wood grain, brick, rust, fabric weave. Load and assign textures from the Tex tab.
Lights
Add and edit lights from the Lights tab. A scene with no lights will still render using its background/environment lighting, but adding a light or two brings out shading and depth.
Environment & fog
With nothing selected, the Properties panel shows scene-wide settings under the Env tab: the background color behind your objects, an optional background texture, and fog. Fog fades distant objects toward a chosen color — useful for hiding the edge of a scene or setting a moody atmosphere.
Materials are shared: if two objects use the same material and you edit it, both update together. If you only want to change one object, look for a "make unique" or per-instance override option before editing.