What is a Material?

Learn that a Material defines how a surface looks.

What is a Material?

While a 3D model's geometry (Mesh) shapes its form, a Material defines how its surface appears and responds to light. All surface traits such as color, shininess, reflections, and transparency are governed through materials.

// Creating a new Material using the Standard shader
Material mat = new Material(Shader.Find("Standard"));

Materials allow the very same 3D cube model to look like polished wood, rusted iron, or frosted glass.

Shader and Material relationship

Every material invariably utilizes a Shader. A shader is a program running on the graphics processor (GPU) that mathematically calculates pixel colors under lighting conditions.

// Accessing the shader used by the material
Shader currentShader = mat.shader;
Console.WriteLine(currentShader.name);

The material acts as a configuration wrapper defining which colors, textures, or glossiness factors are fed into that algorithm.

Exercise Print Material and Shader name

Assign "Wood" to materialName and "Standard" to shaderName. Print Material: Wood | Shader: Standard to the console.

Show example solution

using System;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string materialName = "Wood";
        string shaderName = "Standard";
        Console.WriteLine("Material: " + materialName + " | Shader: " + shaderName);
    }
}

Test yourself

What element defines the surface appearance and light interaction of a 3D model?
- Rigidbody component
- Material
- AudioListener
- NavMeshAgent
Show answer

Material — A Material is the fundamental visual asset encapsulating surface color, texture, and light reflection rules for 3D objects.

Instantiate a new Material

Material customMaterial = new ____(Shader.Find("Standard"));

Show answer

Material customMaterial = new Material(Shader.Find("Standard"));

Material core concepts

Material

Asset holding surface visual settings
Shader

GPU program calculating pixel colors
Surface

Outer surface interacting with light
Mesh

3D geometric wireframe of an object

Next lesson: Albedo and color

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