Materials

A CAD assembly arrives with whatever colours the CAD system happened to store — often one flat grey for everything, sometimes hundreds of near-identical materials. The Materials window is where that becomes a machine you can read: steel that looks like steel, guarding you can see through, signal lamps that glow.

It docks on the right next to Quick Edit and has three sections — Asset, Presets and Edit. Every assignment is an undoable step on the document, so it lands in the GLB when you save.

Asset — material health

The top section summarises what the asset is actually carrying:

Figure	Meaning
Materials	Distinct material instances attached to the asset.
Unique appearance	How many of those actually look different. The gap between this and Materials is pure redundancy.
Meshes	Meshes carrying at least one material.
Textures	Distinct textures, counted by image rather than by reference.
Texture memory	Estimated GPU memory for those textures.

Below the figures sit warnings, and every one of them is actionable — click a warning and the parts it refers to are selected in the 3D view, ready for you to assign something better.

• Duplicate materials — distinct materials that render identically. Merging them cuts draw calls and shrinks the exported GLB. On a freshly imported assembly this is usually the single highest-value cleanup.
• Oversized textures — 2048 px or larger. Machine parts rarely need more than 1K; downscaling cuts load time and GPU memory.
• Non-power-of-two textures — mipmapping and GPU texture compression may be unavailable for these.
• Transparency with no effect — materials flagged transparent at full opacity. They pay the sorting cost of transparency and gain nothing.

Geometry figures — triangles, draw calls — are deliberately not repeated here; they live in Settings → Dev Tools.

Presets — the industrial library

The preset library covers what industrial assemblies are actually made of, grouped into six categories:

Category	Contents
Metal	Steel, Stainless, Brushed Alu, Anodized Alu, Chrome, Copper, Brass, Galvanized, Cast Iron
Plastic	Black, White, Grey and Blue plastic, PTFE / Nylon
Rubber & Glass	Rubber, Conveyor Belt, Glass, Guard Panel, Amber Acrylic
Paint (RAL)	The RAL tones that show up on machine frames — 5015 Sky Blue, 7035 Light Grey, 7016 Anthracite, 9005 Jet Black, 9016 Traffic White, 1023 Traffic Yellow, 3020 Traffic Red, 6018 Yellow Green
Lamp / Signal	Red, Amber, Green, Blue and White signal colours, emissive so they read as lit
Custom	Your own saved presets

Each row has two buttons:

• Assign applies the preset to the current selection.
• Select selects every object in the asset that already uses this material — the fastest way to find “all the parts that are still default grey”.

The swatch is an approximation drawn in CSS rather than a rendered sphere, so a long library stays cheap to display. The built-in values are tuned to read correctly under the viewer’s default lighting rather than to be physically canonical — a textbook mirror-finish steel renders as a near-black mirror in a single-environment scene, so the metals here sit at moderate roughness instead.

Edit — free PBR editing

The Edit section works on the current selection and seeds itself from it, so clicking a part and then dragging a slider starts from what that part already is.

Property	Effect
Base color	The surface colour, picked from a colour field; the hex value is shown next to it.
Metalness	0 for dielectrics (plastic, paint, rubber), 1 for bare metal.
Roughness	0 is a mirror, 1 is fully matt. Machined metal reads well around 0.3–0.5.
Opacity	Below 1 the material is automatically flagged transparent — otherwise the change would be invisible.

Changes apply to the whole selection as you make them, and each is an undoable step.

Saving your own preset

Type a name into the field at the bottom of the Edit section and press Save preset. It appears under Custom and can be assigned like any built-in one; the delete button on the row removes it again.

Custom presets are stored in your browser, not in the document. They follow you between documents on the same machine, and a colleague opening the same model does not inherit them. In a private window, or with site data cleared, the custom list simply comes back empty — the built-in library is unaffected.

See also

• Editor overview — the workspace and the Quick Edit panel
• Importing CAD — where the material load comes from in the first place
• Mesh and structure — the other half of cleaning up an import
• Settings — visual settings and Dev Tools