Shader and material creation

Category: Content Creation. Status: Normative.

Vertcie materials can use direct physical/toon values, managed image textures, procedural textures, mapping controls, normal/bump processing, and bounded layered composition. The shader editor stores a versioned graph and compiles it into the runtime material payload.

Basic material workflow

1. Add a Material node or open a reusable material in the material catalog.
2. Choose a Principled BSDF for physically based surfaces or Toon Shader for stepped shading.
3. Set base color, roughness, metalness, opacity, transmission, and other supported surface values.
4. Add managed image textures or procedural nodes as needed.
5. Connect values to compatible sockets and then to Material Output.
6. Assign the material to the intended mesh or material set.
7. Preview in raster mode and, when required, check path-tracing compatibility.
8. Save a new version rather than replacing published material history.

Node families

Material Output is required and cannot be authored away. Socket type validation prevents incompatible connections and cycles.

Image textures and mapping

Use managed card assets instead of arbitrary permanent URLs. Select the correct semantic slot: color, roughness, metalness, alpha, transmission, normal, bump, clearcoat, emissive, ambient occlusion, displacement, or another supported runtime slot.

Configure Tile X/Y, rotation, Flip U, and Flip V using the Texture mapping workflow node or Mapping shader node. Verify scale on the actual model UVs; a swatch preview alone cannot validate UV orientation.

Normal maps and bump maps are different inputs. Route normal textures through Normal Map and height textures through Bump. Bump strength is bounded from -10 to 10.

Procedural textures

Procedural maps evaluate at runtime and do not persist a generated bitmap. Common controls include two colors, scale, angle, width, detail, distortion, and seed. Evaluation depth is bounded; deeply nested procedural chains are rejected or normalized.

Fabric Weave produces alternating warp and weft yarns with open gaps for mesh seating. Use black and white yarn values into Opacity for the cutout, and route the same Weave output through Bump for runtime-derived surface normals. A second Weave instance can provide the visible yarn colors or roughness variation.

Use procedural textures when they should respond consistently across configurations. Use managed image textures when exact authored pixels, branding, or scanned materials matter.

Layered materials

Mix Shader combines two complete material branches. Constant factors may compile to material interpolation; procedural or managed-image factors become runtime masks. Supported mask channels are red, green, blue, alpha, and luminance, with invert and range controls.

The current graph limits are 200 nodes, 600 links, 80 values per node, and evaluation depth 12. Runtime layered programs allow at most 24 leaves and 24 mixes.

Path tracing

Path tracing fails closed for active unsupported features, including custom nodal shaders, toon material, vertex displacement, anisotropy, and dispersion. The export/runtime must report the reason and use an explicit raster fallback; never silently claim a path-traced result.

Material review checklist

• Correct material assigned to every intended mesh.
• No missing managed texture assets or expired URLs embedded as state.
• Color-space intent is correct for color versus data maps.
• Alpha/transparency and double-sided behavior are intentional.
• Normal/bump direction and strength are correct.
• Tiling and rotation work across representative geometry.
• Layer masks produce the expected branches at boundaries.
• Raster and supported path-traced output are visually reviewed.
• Reusable library linkage versus merged copies is intentional.