Materials are digital properties that determine a mesh’s surface and interaction with light. This section overviews how to access the Node Material Editor.
Getting to Babylon’s Node Material Editor (NME)
Let’s go through how to access the NME to create materials in the CAS:
1. From the main CAS menu, select the Material Base link. |
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2. You will find yourself in the Material Base page. |
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3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select the + Create New button. |
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4. The NME will open, allowing you to create a material using the NME tools. |
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5. When you have made your material to your satisfaction, give the material a name in the Node Material Name bracket (circled in red) and then Upload Material (circled in blue). Your material will be created in the Material Base library, and you may continue to iterate the material in the NME as long as you select the Upload Material option using the same Node Material name. |
Creating a Material
The NME is a tool embedded into the CAS from Babylon.js. Documentation of how to use the NME can be found here.
To see a quick example of how to use the NME to create a material, check this video out:
A quick hint would be to work off an existing material and save your iteration as a new material name. Be sure not to override any existing material.
Best Practices
Here are some general guidelines for creating material bases in the NME:
In the NME, you ideally should not need to have a texture file attached to your image texture nodes because that would be done in the Material Instance Editor (next sub-tab), though the image texture node would still be required to input the texture.
We recommend naming your material bases in a way that best makes sense to you and your organisational sensibilities. Be sure to ensure that you are not overriding anyone else’s materials as you work on them.