Geometry & 3D node
Material
A surface, as a node: Color, Roughness, Metallic, Emission bundled into one Material output. Cable it into a Mesh — or into several, and they all share the one surface, edited in one place. A connected Material overrides the Mesh's own inline values; unplugged, the Mesh keeps its own.
Inputs
| Port | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
| ColorBase colour. On a metallic surface it becomes the colour of the reflection — gold, not yellow plastic. | color | (0.85, 0.85, 0.88, 1) |
| TextureAn image that paints the surface's base colour — any generator's output, a Video Player, a camera. Unconnected, the Color alone shows. | image | — |
| Normal MapA tangent-space normal map (bluish image) that adds surface detail to the lighting without more geometry. | image | — |
| RoughnessHow diffuse the surface is: low is a sharp highlight, high is matte. | float | 0.45 |
| MetallicMetal or not — metals take all their colour from the reflection. | float | 0 |
| EmissionSelf-glow, regardless of the light — screens, neon, embers. | float | 0 |
| DisplacementA height picture — a Depth Estimation output, the scene's own Depth pass, any grayscale image. Each vertex moves along its normal by (height − Displace Midpoint) × Displace Amount, on the GPU, live for video. Brighter = out. | image | — |
| Displace AmountHow far a fully bright pixel moves the surface out, in the mesh's own units (−10…10; negative pushes in). Shading normals follow the map per pixel, so a coarse mesh still lights right; a Plane's Resolution sets how finely the silhouette can bend. | float | 0.2 |
| Displace MidpointThe height that does not move (0…1, default 0.5): below it the surface sinks, above it rises. 0 keeps the whole relief in front of the original surface. | float | 0.5 |
| Displace SmoothBox blur of the height in map texels, 0…3, applied where the height is read — the relief rounds off and its shading follows. Use it on a coarse or noisy depth map; it does not add mesh detail (a Plane's Resolution does). | float | 0 |
| Edge TearHides triangles stretched across a depth jump — the curtains between a figure and its background. 0 = off; small values tear only the sharpest jumps, 1 tears gentle slopes too. Depth, Normals and ID passes tear the same. | float | 0 |
Outputs
| Port | Type |
|---|---|
| Material | structure |
How It Works
Material is a surface, as a node: Color, Roughness, Metallic, Emission, plus a Texture and a Normal Map, bundled into one Material output.
Cable it into a Mesh — or into several, and they all share the one surface, edited in one place. A connected Material overrides the Mesh's own inline values; unplugged, the Mesh keeps its own.
Use Cases
- One surface, many meshes — Change the look of a whole assembly from one node.
- Animated materials — An LFO on Emission or a colour cable on Color affects everything that shares it.
- Material libraries — Several Material nodes parked in the patch as a palette.
- Textured surfaces — Any image cable as the albedo, including a live video or a Live Shader.
- 3D Paths and Plot 3D — Both take a Material cable, so the whole scene can share a look.
Tips
- Roughness near 0 with Metallic 1 is a mirror; near 1 with Metallic 0 is chalk. Most real surfaces are in between.
- Emission is not a light — it makes the surface bright but does not illuminate anything else. Add a Light for that.
- Model Import publishes a Material output of its own, so an imported file's surfaces can be reused.
- An unplugged Material changes nothing; the Mesh silently falls back to its inline values.
Open Material in the interactive catalog →
Material is one of 381 nodes in Grafit Pro.
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