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:

• Materials Presets - A number of pre-made materials are available from the Materials Presets tray. Click an item in the tray to apply it to your active model in the 3D View. These can be useful if you’ve never worked with materials before.
  
• Mudbox Material - This material can represent both Blinn and Lafortune shading models and includes options for specifying image-based lighting. This is the recommended base material, and is the default material assigned to models in Mudbox.

  This material should be used if you plan to paint or assign textures to a model. It provides texture channels for diffuse, specular, gloss, specular2, gloss2, bump, and reflection.

  NotePainting or assigning textures to each of the material’s texture channels will increase memory usage on your computer’s graphics card. Interactive performance can be reduced as a result depending on the number, resolution, and bit depth of each assigned texture. For more information, see Graphics memory optimization.
• Simple Blinn - This material represents a simplified Blinn shading material and can be used on computers equipped with older, unsupported, or lower performance graphics cards to provide sculpting and basic color properties. It does not provide texture channel capabilities for 3D painting.
• Lit Sphere Material - This material is a CgFX file but additionally includes a Lit Sphere technique that defines the material.
• CgFX-based Material - This material is an example CgFX file. Use it as a template to create your own CgFX files and materials.