Material Editor

The Material Editor lets you tweak PBR material properties on any MeshNode or ModelNode sub-mesh and see a live preview without leaving the editor.

Opening the Material Editor

Select a MeshNode or ModelNode in the Hierarchy.
Go to Window → Material Editor (or the Material Editor tab in the main dock).
The editor automatically tracks the selected node.

Interface

The editor is split into two panels:

Left Panel — Properties

Sub-mesh picker (top bar) — for ModelNode with multiple sub-meshes, select which material to edit.

Base Material

Property	Description
Base Color	RGBA albedo. Alpha drives transparency in Blend/Mask mode.
Metallic	0 = dielectric, 1 = metal.
Roughness	0 = mirror-smooth, 1 = fully diffuse.

Emissive

Property	Description
Emissive Color	RGB glow colour. Multiplied with emissive texture if present.
Emissive Strength	Scalar multiplier (0–20).

Transparency

Property	Description
Alpha Mode	`Opaque`, `Mask` (alpha cut-out), or `Blend` (alpha blending).
Alpha Cutoff	Threshold for Mask mode (0–1).

Flags

Property	Description
Lit	Toggle PBR lighting on/off for this material.
Double Sided	Disables back-face culling.

Textures

Texture paths are relative to the project root. Click the … button to open a file browser.

Slot	Description
Albedo	sRGB base colour texture. Alpha channel used for transparency.
Normal	Tangent-space normal map (OpenGL convention, Y-up).
Metallic / Roughness	R = metallic, G = roughness (glTF packed format).
Emissive	sRGB emissive colour texture.

After setting paths, click Reload Textures to apply them immediately.

Right Panel — Preview Sphere

A 48 × 48 CPU-rasterised sphere with:

GGX specular + Lambert diffuse (Cook-Torrance BRDF)
Fixed directional light from upper-left
ACES tone-mapping

The preview refreshes automatically whenever you change a material property. It does not require a running game session.

Saving Materials

Material changes on MeshNode are stored directly in the .solscene file when you hit File → Save Scene (or Ctrl+S). No separate material file format is used.

Lua Access

You can also read and modify material properties from Lua:

local mesh = Scene.get_node("MyBox")

-- Read
local color = mesh:get_material_base_color()   -- Vec4

-- Write
mesh:set_material_base_color(Vec4(1, 0, 0, 1))   -- red
mesh:set_material_metallic(0.8)
mesh:set_material_roughness(0.2)
mesh:set_material_emissive(Vec3(1, 0.5, 0))