Materials & Lighting

Give a shape depth and shine with bumps, roughness, metal, and a light you can aim.

A flat shape becomes a lit object when you give it a material: a small set of maps that describe its surface, plus a light to reveal them. This is how a plain ring becomes a gold frame, or a painted panel becomes worn metal.

The four maps#

A material bundles up to four maps. Only Albedo is required; the rest add realism.

Map What it controls Think of it as
Albedo The base color. The paint.
Normal Which way the surface tilts, pixel by pixel. The bumps and grooves.
Roughness Matte (soft, spread highlight) to glossy (tight, sharp highlight). Chalk vs polished.
Metallic Whether it reads as metal or not. Gold vs plastic.

Build and light a material#

Add a Material node and wire your maps in: paint or a Gradient Map into Albedo, a bump source into Normal, and so on. Roughness and Metallic have sliders that stand in until you wire a map. Set Metallic to 1 for gold or steel, leave it at 0 for anything non-metal.

Node What it does
Material Bundle the maps into one material.
Material Blend Blend two materials together, map by map.
Material Preview A live lit preview. Shift+Alt+drag on it to aim the light.
Material Light Turn the lit material back into a plain image, with sliders for Light Angle, Light Elevation, Light Strength, and Ambient. Reset puts all four back to their defaults.

Use Material Preview to dial in the look, then wire Material Light downstream once you like it: it hands you an ordinary image you can composite, cut out, and export.

Bumps from a shape: Bevel#

The quickest way to get a rounded, light-catching surface is the Bevel node. It ramps a shape's edges up into a pillow and hands you both a height and a ready-made Normal, so you wire Bevel Normal straight into Material Normal with no Normal Map node in between.

For a clean bevel on a curved edge, feed the Bevel from a shape's distance rather than its picture: wire SDF Shape's Distance output into Bevel's Distance input. The bevel then follows the true curve, with no stair-stepping under a bright highlight.

SDF Shape  --Distance-->  Bevel  --Normal-->  Material

Smoothing softens the pillow (leave it at 0 when you use the Distance input, which is already smooth); Normal Intensity deepens the tilt.

Cut it out and shadow it#

A lit material fills its whole frame. To make a game-ready piece, cut it to the shape and drop a shadow behind it:

  • Alpha Merge takes color from one input and transparency from another. Feed the lit material into RGB and the shape's silhouette into Alpha; everything outside the shape goes clear.
  • Drop Shadow reads that transparency and lays a soft, offset shadow behind it.

The result exports straight to a transparent PNG.

Where to next#