Material defines properties of geometry surface and how exactly it is rendered by the pipeline.

Techniques

Each Material references at least one Technique that defines exact sequence and parameters of scene passes in rendering pipeline.

Used Technique may be selected based on the distance to the Geometry using this Material, and/or based on selected quality level.

Techniques should be ordered (1) by distance from furthest to nearest and (2) from highest to lowest quality:

Most distant & highest quality
...
Most distant & lowest quality
Second most distant & highest quality
...

First technique with distance greater or equal to current distance and with quality level less or equal to current quality level is selected and used for rendering.

Textures

Each Material may reference zero or more Texture resources that will be available later in shaders for sampling.

Some textures can be easily reused for custom purposes despite semantics, some textures should be reused with much caution.

These textures are available on all platforms:

Name	Description	Reusable
diffuse	Diffuse or albedo map. For refractive geometries, contains background color texture.	Yes
normal	Normal map.	Yes
specular	Specular map, or PBR material and occlusion map.	Yes
emissive	Emission map, or light map, or occlusion map (deprecated).	Yes

|**environment**|2D or cube texture used for reflection. This texture is usually set automatically during rendering.| |**lightramp**|Internal. Used to control light source distance attenuation.|| |**lightshape**|Internal. Texture projected by light source.|| |**shadowmap**|Internal. Shadow map for light source.||

These textures are available only on Desktop platforms:

Name	Description	Reusable
depth	Readable depth buffer from previous pass(es).
...	There's more, but other textures don't have any special meaning.	Yes

Parameters

Each Material may declare zero or more shader parameters of the following types:

float
Vector2
Vector3
Vector4

Shader parameters are passed to shader into Material, mostly without any additional transformations.

See Material section in _Uniforms.glsl for exact list of default parameters.

Special notes:

FadeOffsetScale defines depth offset and range in units for soft edges e.g. for particles and water. Shader receives values normalized to camera z range. Depth range is inverted.

Shader Defines

Material may define shader macros that will be defined at shader compilation time.

Be careful with spawning multiple shader permutations. Each unique combination of shader macros will lead to more shader switches during rendering.

Most of shader defines are passed as is to shaders without additional behaviors.

Note: ALPHAMASK macro is used for additional optimizations during shadow rendering.

See "Material defines" section in _Config.glsl for detailed list of available material defines.

Configuration

Material has several built-in parameters:

Name	Description	Default Value
cull	Defines whether and how geometry is culled	ccw
> cw	Front faces (clockwise) are culled.
> ccw	Back faces (counterclockwise) are culled.
> none	No faces are culled.
shadowcull	Same as cull, but for shadow rendering. Use opposite value of cull to reduce shadow acne and increase peter panning.	ccw
fill	How to fill geometry. Always solid on mobile platforms.	solid
> solid	Draw triangles as solid triangles, lines as lines.
> wireframe	Draw triangles as wireframe, lines as lines.
> point	Draw triangles and lines as points. Why tho.
depthbias	Constant and scaled depth biases. May be used to reduce z-fighting for decals.
alphatocoverage	Whether to treat alpha output of pixel shader as MSAA coverage.
lineantialias	Whether to enable alpha-based line antialiasing. I have no clue. You probably don't need it.
renderorder	Materials with lower order are always rendered before materials with higher order.

|**occlusion**|Whether to use geometry with this material for occlusion culling. Since occluders are configured per-object, you probably don't need it. Just uncheck "occluder" flag for occluder Drawable.|