Materials

A material defines how a piece of scene geometry is shaded: the color of a mesh or of hair strands, how glossy or metallic a surface is, how transparent it is, and which texture maps drive any of those. Materials in Ornatrix App are nodes of the groom, like operators and textures, and one definition serves every way the App can draw the geometry: the Shaded viewport, the ProRender Raytraced preview and the Cycles Realistic preview each translate the same material into their own native shading, so what you set up once looks consistent across all three.

Without a material, a scene geometry is shaded with its Color property alone, as it always has been. The one exception is the head of a Human operator, which comes with a default skin: it is shaded with skin textures until a material is assigned to it. Assigning a material replaces that flat color, or the default skin, with the full description below.

The two material types

Both are found under the Materials category when adding a node, and both have the same output, which connects to the Material input of a scene geometry.

Surface Material shades polygon meshes with a physically based metalness and roughness model:

Base Color - the diffuse color of the surface.
Metalness - 0 is a dielectric with a neutral highlight, 1 a metal that tints its reflection with the base color and has no diffuse.
Roughness - 0 is a mirror, 1 fully diffuse.
Specular - the weight of the specular reflection.
Normal Map - an optional tangent space normal map perturbing the shading normal.
Opacity - 1 is fully opaque; lower values let what is behind the surface show through.
Emission - light emitted by the surface, black for none.

Hair Material shades strands with a dedicated hair model:

Base Color - the color of the strands at their roots.
Tip Color and Tip Blend - the color the strands blend towards along their length, and how much of it they have reached at the tip. 0 keeps the whole strand in its base color, 1 makes the tip fully the tip color.
Roughness, Specular and Specular Tint - the sharpness, weight and color of the highlight along the strands.
Opacity - 1 is fully opaque.
Hue Variation - a random hue shift applied to each strand around the base color, breaking up the uniform look of a single color. 0 gives every strand exactly the base color.

A hair material assigned to a mesh, or a surface material assigned to hair, is translated as best it can be, but each type is meant for its own kind of geometry.

Assigning a material

Select a scene geometry and find the Material row at the bottom of its properties. It shows the material icon and a button naming the assigned material, or None.

With nothing assigned, click the button to open the material menu. Create makes a new Surface Material or Hair Material, connects it to the geometry in one step and selects it, so its channels are right there to edit.
With a material assigned, a left click on the button selects the material node to edit its channels; a right click opens the menu.
Connect lists every material node already in the groom, so one material can shade several geometries. Picking one replaces the material currently assigned.
Remove disconnects the material. The geometry returns to its plain Color, and a material nothing else uses any more is collected with the other unused nodes.

The same connection can be made in the node graph by wiring a material node's output into the geometry's Material input, and a material can also be created from the Materials category of the add-node menus like any other node. Creating a material while an operator is selected does not insert it into that operator's chain: materials only ever hang off a scene geometry's Material input.

Texture maps on channels

Every channel except Hue Variation has a texture map slot beside its value, the same slot other operators use for their maps. Connect a procedural texture, a painted map or an image to it and the map replaces the constant: on a mesh it is sampled per texture coordinate, on hair it is sampled at each strand's root, so a hair map colors strands individually rather than painting across their length. This is how a cutout is applied to a surface - connect an alpha map to Opacity - and how a scalp texture colors a groom root by root.

A map connected to a material channel is edited like any other map: select the texture node, or use the Paint Texture Tool and Edit Texture Tool on it. The material updates as the map changes.

Materials in each renderer

Shaded viewport - meshes are drawn with the material's lighting model directly; hair strands get their material colors baked per vertex, with the tip blend, highlight and hue variation applied in the hair shader. Opacity below 1 blends the geometry with what is behind it.
ProRender (Raytraced) - the material becomes a ProRender physically based material with every mapped channel as an image texture; transparency is traced, so transparent surfaces show what is behind them rather than merely darkening.
Cycles (Realistic) - a surface material becomes a Principled shader and a hair material a hair shader, with the channel maps handed over as images.

Hair cards keep their own atlas-driven material, described in Hair Cards.

Materials in imported and exported files

Materials travel with geometry through the scene file formats that can carry them. Importing an OBJ (with its .mtl library), FBX or USD mesh creates a Surface Material assigned to it, with texture nodes reading the image files the material references, and USD hair comes in with a Hair Material; see OBJ Import, FBX Import and USD Import. Exporting to USD writes the material assigned to each hair or mesh as a UsdPreviewSurface network any USD application can shade with, its maps saved as images beside the file, and an Ornatrix host reading the file back gets the material as it was; see USD Export. Alembic has no material of its own, so hair exported there carries only the strand colors its Hair Material gives it; see Alembic Export.

Rendering with ProRender and Rendering with Cycles - the two rendered previews the materials feed.
Hair and Guide Viewport Display - the fast working view.
Editing Operator Properties - the texture map slots on channels.
The Node Graph - wiring materials to scene geometries by hand.