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Materials

Commercial

Included in the public demo Compare editions

A CAD assembly uses the colours stored by the CAD system. Often everything is flat grey; sometimes there are hundreds of near-identical materials. Use the Materials window to give steel a metallic appearance, make guarding transparent and make signal lamps glow.

It docks on the right next to Quick Edit and has three sections: Asset, Presets and Edit. Every assignment is an undoable change to the document and is included in the GLB when you save.

The Materials window docked on the right: the Asset section with materials, unique appearance, meshes, textures and texture memory, two orange warnings for one duplicate material and 22 oversized textures, and the preset library below with the Metal and Plastic categories, each entry offering Assign and Select

Asset — material health

Section titled “Asset — material health”

The top section summarises the asset’s materials and textures:

FigureMeaning
MaterialsDistinct material instances attached to the asset.
Unique appearanceHow many of those actually look different. The gap between this and Materials is pure redundancy.
MeshesMeshes carrying at least one material.
TexturesDistinct textures, counted by image rather than by reference.
Texture memoryEstimated GPU memory for those textures.

Warnings appear below the figures. Click a warning to select the affected parts in the 3D view, where you can assign different materials.

  • Duplicate materials: distinct materials that render identically. Merging them cuts draw calls and shrinks the exported GLB. This is usually the most useful cleanup for a freshly imported assembly.
  • 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 incur transparency sorting costs without changing the appearance.

Geometry figures, such as triangles and draw calls, appear in Settings → Dev Tools, not here.

Presets — the industrial library

Section titled “Presets — the industrial library”

The preset library contains materials for industrial assemblies, grouped into six categories:

CategoryContents
MetalSteel, Stainless, Brushed Alu, Anodized Alu, Chrome, Copper, Brass, Galvanized, Cast Iron
PlasticBlack, White, Grey and Blue plastic, PTFE / Nylon
Rubber & GlassRubber, 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 / SignalRed, Amber, Green, Blue and White signal colours, emissive so they read as lit
CustomYour 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, for example all parts still using default grey.

The swatch is an approximation drawn in CSS rather than a rendered sphere, which keeps large libraries quick to display. The built-in values are tuned for the viewer’s default lighting rather than strict physical accuracy. Physically accurate mirror-finish steel renders as a near-black mirror in a single-environment scene. The metal presets therefore use moderate roughness.

Edit — free PBR editing

Section titled “Edit — free PBR editing”

The Edit section uses the current selection’s material values. Select a part, then adjust a slider to change its existing appearance.

PropertyEffect
Base colorThe surface colour, picked from a colour field; the hex value is shown next to it.
Metalness0 for dielectrics (plastic, paint, rubber), 1 for bare metal.
Roughness0 is a mirror, 1 is fully matt. Machined metal reads well around 0.3–0.5.
OpacityBelow 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

Section titled “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. You can use them across documents on the same machine, but colleagues opening the model do not receive them. In a private window, or after clearing site data, the custom list is empty. The built-in library is unaffected.

See also

Section titled “See also”