Material

Material projects turn a node graph into surface maps for one target mesh. They are for authoring material data, not for editing mesh topology.

VFX Loom 1.2 adds a production Material Library with approximately 100 ready-to- use materials, a larger Floating Material Preview, and dedicated Preview Lighting controls for judging a surface before export.

Material Library

Open the Material Library from a Material project to browse the production catalogue. Search or browse the cards, inspect the preview, and import a material into the current workflow. Importing a material gives you a starting point; it does not replace the graph you are authoring.

Create a Material project

Choose New Project → Material. Select the target mesh in the Material workflow, or use the selected MeshPart where the UI offers Use Selected Mesh. The target’s UV layout is the coordinate system for the generated maps.

The core terminal is Material Output. Its optional inputs are:

• Color
• Normal
• Roughness
• Metalness
• Emission Mask

Unconnected channels use the node’s documented defaults. Connect the output to Asset Output when the same mesh also has a Geometry Beta deformation.

Useful Material sources

Material-specific sources include Mesh Curvature, Mesh Position, Mesh Normal, Mesh Ambient Occlusion, and UV Selection. Image and processing nodes can be used around them. Normal From Height converts a height image to a tangent-space normal map; Roughness remaps an image into a grayscale roughness map; Cavity / Curvature extracts local height detail as a mask.

A simple surface-map graph is shown in the Material surface maps example. The Material maps and masked detail example shows a second compact arrangement using mesh-derived detail.

Preview

The Material workflow provides a 2D texture view for inspecting generated maps and a 3D preview for judging the assembled surface. The shared Preview DockWidget can display the material on Sphere, Cube, Plane, Custom, or the selected mesh when Use Selected Mesh is available. This is a preview target, not a modeling workspace.

Floating preview and lighting

Use Floating Material Preview when the docked preview is too small for checking surface detail. The preview can be lit with controls for Azimuth, Elevation and Ambient Fill. Reset Lighting returns to the default presentation without changing the material graph.

The preview lighting is a viewing aid. It does not become part of the exported material maps.

Surface controls

Material Texture Tiling and Output Tiling X/Y control how source texture data repeats across the target UVs. Opacity, Alpha Mode and Metalness are part of the material output workflow and should be checked before export. These controls change the material result; Preview Lighting only changes how that result is displayed.

The material output can still collect Color, Normal, Roughness, Metalness and Emission Mask maps. Unconnected channels retain their documented defaults.

Mesh-derived detail

Mesh Curvature now provides a clearer Width control for choosing the detail scale used by the curvature result. Use the improved UV Viewer to inspect face and island selection states, and enable UV selection visualization when you need to relate a selected UV region back to the 3D mesh.

Mesh targets

An individual MeshPart can be used as one material target. A Model can provide a multi-part target through its MeshPart descendants; the preview keeps those parts as an assembly rather than flattening the Model into one mesh. Use Selected Mesh captures a selected MeshPart. When a Model is selected, choose its material target through the Material workflow and select the intended MeshPart when a single target is required.

A MeshPart without a usable UV layout previews as a flat colour. Unwrap the mesh before authoring UV-based maps.

Export

Use Export Maps to export the material map set for the selected target. The map resolution follows the project/export settings, each map is limited to a maximum axis of 2048 pixels, and the images are derived from the target UV layout.

When a Material project contains Geometry, the combined 3D preview shows the deformed mesh with its material. Use Bake Static Mesh for the recommended runtime path. Export Animated Mesh is marked EXPERIMENTAL and is intended for lightweight procedural runtime VFX.

Material projects are not flipbooks: the VFX ParticleEmitter flipbook export path is not their product output.