Overview

A material is a container for one or more shaders, referred to as “passes.” These shaders described how something should be rendered, such as how an object's color, how a flat plane might display a certain texture, how a color filter might effect the look of the Lens and more!

Take a look at how you can create your own shaders/passes in the Material Editor overview.

How Materials and Shaders are represented

In the Asset Browser panel, materials and passes can be distinguished by their icons. For example, “uber” is a pass used in “Uber PBR,” which is a material.

Double clicking on a pass in the Asset Browser opens the Shader Graph. Double clicking on a material in the Asset Browser opens the Inspector panel.

To add a pass to a material, click “+ Add Pass” in the material’s Inspector panel.

Materials can also be imported from the Asset Library or exported and imported as an .lsmat from a current Lens Studio project.

Creating and Using Built-in Materials

In many cases, you can use the built-in materials to display your content, without worrying about passes. For example, if you just wanted to display an image, without caring about lighting, you can use the built in "Unlit" material. Or, if you want to care about lighting (e.g. on a 3D object), you can use the "PBR" material.

This guide provides instruction on the process of creating and editing basic materials for 3D objects in Lens Studio, as well as an overview of the default material types available in Lens Studio.

When adding default materials, Lens Studio will automatically add the associated shader.

Adding a Material

There are three ways to add a Material to a Lens Studio project:

• Creating a new Material
• Importing a Material from a FBX file
• Importing a Material from an existing Lens Studio project

The following sections cover each of these methods.

Creating a New Material

You can create a new Material from the Asset Browser panel.

First, in the Asset Browser panel, click +.

Select Material, then select a material type (for example, "Diffuse").

You can create a new Graph Material this way by selecting any material with "Graph" in the name (for example, "Graph PBR").
See the Material Editor guides for more information on editing Graph Materials.

Importing a Material from an FBX File

When you import a 3D Object (FBX) into your project, any materials included in the FBX definition will be automatically imported as well.

Once your FBX is imported, you should see the Material under your 3D Object in Asset Browser panel.

For more information on importing and exporting 3D objects, visit the 3D Object Import and 3D Object Export guide.

Importing a Material from an Existing Lens StudioProject

In the Asset Browser panel, select + From Files, or drag the .lsmat file into Asset Browser panel.

Navigate to the material file from your previous project and select it.

Select Open.

You should see the selected Material in your Asset Browser panel.

Material Types

There are a number of default Material types built into Lens Studio.

Diffuse

A basic shaded material. It makes use of scene lights to smoothly shade the mesh, and supports environmental maps as well.

Unlit

A flat, unshaded material. Supports texture but does not use any lighting information to shade the object.

Occluder

This material can be applied to an object to occlude, or mask, other objects.

For more information on how to create your own occluder objects, visit the Occluder guide.

PBR

This is a physically based rendering material that simulates the way light works in the real world.

To read more about how to set up PBR materials in Lens Studio, please visit the Substance Texturing guide.

Matte Shadow

This material is applied to objects that receive shadows, and render only as the received shadow. This is useful when you would like to ground other objects in your scene, adding an extra level of realism.

For more information on how to cast and receive shadows in a Lens, visit the Light and Shadow guide.

Default Material Properties

The following breakdown provides information on the properties shared by Lens Studio's materials.

Depth Test

Enables depth-sorting.

Depth Write

Enables writing to the depth buffer.

Depth Function

The comparison method used to sort the depth buffer. Defaults to LessEqual.

Two-sided

Whether the material renders on both sides of a mesh face.

Color Mask

Enables toggling visibility of selected color channel mask of this material

Cull Mode

Whether the material culls front or back faces, default to back.

Blend Mode

The material's blend mode. Available options:

• Disabled
• Normal
• Multiply
• Add
• Premultiplied Alpha
• Glass
• Colored Glass
• Alpha Test
• Alpha To Coverage
• Screen
• Min
• Max

Polygon Offset

Changes the position that each polygon gets drawn.

Frustum Culling

Determines if vertices not on screen would be drawn. Leave as Auto for best performance.

Instance Count

Determines amount of instances of this material being drawn in the scene.

Vertex Color

Specifies the purpose for which vertex color will be used. Requires vertex color to be supplied by the mesh.

Base Color

Specifies the base color (albedo) of the material if the base texture is disabled. Multiplied with the base texture otherwise.

Base Texture

The texture used as a color (albedo) source.

Texture	The texture used as a color (albedo) source.
Texture UV	Specifies the UV set used for sampling this texture.

Opacity Texture

Enables use of a separate texture as the alpha source for blending. If disabled, the Base Color's alpha channel is used for opacity.

Texture	The texture used as an opacity source.
Texture UV	Specifies the UV set used for sampling this texture.

Recolor

Allows recolor of the material by channel.

Detail Map

Add a secondary texture that overlays on top of the main textures

Texture	The texture used for detail map.
Texture UV	Specifies the UV set used for sampling this texture.

Detail Mask

Controls opacity of the detail map.

Texture	The texture used for detail mask.
Texture UV	Specifies the UV set used for sampling this texture.

Normal Map

Enables the normal map texture and normal mapping.

Texture	The texture used as a normal source.
Texture UV	Specifies the UV set used for sampling this texture.

Emissive

Enables the emissive texture.

Texture	The texture used as an emissive color source.
Texture UV	Specifies the UV set used for sampling this texture.
Color	The color of the emissive.
Intensity	Multiplies the existing emissive color.

Simple Reflection

Replaces the default PBR environment mapping with a simple lookup from a regular texture (no hdr, no roughness, no fresnel, etc.). It can even be used with unlit materials. The reflection lookup technically assumes a spherical environment map, which is a circular shaped texture.

Texture	The texture to use as a reflection map.
Intensity	The strength of the reflection effect.
Modulation Map	Modulates reflections based on a texture input

Rim Highlight

Enables rim highlighting, aka Fresnel.

Color	Specifies the color of the rim highlight.
Intensity	Factor multiplied with Color.
Exponent	Controls the tightness of the rim highlight.
Invert	Allows inverse of the rim highlight.
Rim Color Texture	Allows the use of a texture to modulate the rim highlight color.

Lighting

Enables direct and indirect (ambient) lighting. Disabling this creates an unlit (flat) shader.

Diffuse	Enables direct and indirect diffuse lighting. Can be disabled as an optimization on pure metals.
Specular	Enables direct and indirect specular lighting (specular highlights and reflections), disabling this would produce a material only lit diffusely.
Metallic	1 means metal, 0 means non-metal. Multiplies the metallic (R) channel of the Materials Params texture if enabled.
Roughness	1 means completely rough, 0 means smooth and shinny. Multiplies the roughness (G) channel of the Materials Params texture if enabled. If roughness is 1 and metallic is 0, it is more efficient to disable Specular.
Material Params	Texture input with special colored channels, R - metallic, G - smoothness, B - ambient occlusion
Camera Reflections	Use the live camera feed as the source of environment map, this replaces users' environment map. Adjust its Roughness for blurring of the envmap.
Specular AO	Allows AO to influence indirect specular lighting (reflections)
Baked Shadows	Will use the baked shadow texture to shadow one or more light

Fizzle

Allows the material to fizzle in and out based on a noise function, driven by the Transition parameter, 0 is fully visible and 1 fully invisible.

Transition	The strength of the Fizzle effect

Tone Mapping

Normally all materials are rendered with HDR tone mapping enabled so they fit into the 3D scene correctly, however, for some uses like UI elements or materials specific blend modes, you might want to turn off tone mapping.

Transformed UV

Allows Tiling and Animation of textures, be sure to set the Texture UV to the correct Transformed UV accordingly.

For more information on creating textures such as Material Params, visit the Texturing guide.

Vertex Color Material

If your model has vertex color information that you'd like to use as the base color of its material, you can create a custom material that does so in a few steps.

Create a new Material.

On the new Material, disable the Base Texture property, set Vertex Color property to Base Color.