Create and apply materials
 
 
 

To make your model appear in different colors, have matte or reflective characteristics, and so on, you must edit or apply its material characteristics. A material is a collection of properties assigned to a model that control how its surfaces react to light and appear in the 3D View.

Examples of material properties include: color, glossiness, and transparency. A material can also be categorized by the mathematical algorithms that its based on, for example: Blinn, Lit Sphere, and so on.

Every model in Mudbox is assigned the Mudbox Material by default. You can edit this material, assign other pre-made materials from the Material Presets tray, or create your own custom CgFX materials as well as apply texture maps.

Mudbox lets you paint directly on a model using the paint tools to create texture maps. A texture map is an image you add to an existing material to enhance its appearance beyond what the material's basic properties provide. You can import images as paint layers to use them as texture maps and create the appearance of bumps, apply a logo image, apply a pattern or a marbled color image for example.

Texture maps allow you to add visual detail that would be otherwise difficult to achieve by sculpting alone and achieve a more realistic appearance.

Mudbox provides the following CgFX-based material types:

Create and assign a material to a model

Do one of the following:

Edit a material’s properties

Do one of the following:

Delete a material

  1. Right-click the material in the Object List, then select Delete Material from the menu that appears.
NoteThe default material cannot be deleted.

Related topics

Material properties

Using CgFX-based materials

Paint using layers