Metals and coatings
Set metallic, roughness and specular response, then add anisotropy with its own rotation for brushed and machined finishes. A clear coat with separate roughness and tint lets you build painted, lacquered and pearlescent layers.
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Purposeful material controls
Start from the kind of material you are specifying — plastic, metal, paint, glass, fabric — and tune only the qualities that make the part read correctly.
Surface response
The controls a CMF review actually needs.
Each material type shows the settings that matter for it, so a moulded housing, a brushed bezel and a frosted lens each get a focused set of controls rather than one long list.
Light through the part
Transmission, index of refraction and dispersion handle glass, lenses and light guides. Subsurface scattering, translucency and transparency distances in millimetres cover silicone keypads, frosted diffusers and soft-touch overmoulds.
Special effects that earn their place
Sheen for fabric and velvet, thin-film iridescence for coated optics and pearlescent paint, opacity for perforated grilles, and emission for LEDs and screens — including colour temperature and brightness settings.
Start close, then refine
Pick a material type from basic families such as Plastic, Metal, Paint, Glass and Translucent, or from advanced types including metallic paint, gem, velvet, cloth and measured materials. Ready-made starting points — chrome, brushed metal, anodised blue, glossy and matte plastic, soft-touch, frosted glass, rubber, ceramic and pearlescent — put a credible finish on a selection in one step. Changing type carries your compatible colours and values across, so you can compare a painted and an anodised version of the same part without starting again.
Values respond to dragging, with fine and coarse modifiers, arrow-key steps or typed entry, and every change renders live. Copy and paste a whole material between parts, or select every part that shares a material before a batch edit.
Example: a handheld power tool
Give the main housing a glass-filled textured plastic, the overmould a soft-touch subsurface finish, the chuck a brushed metal with its highlights running around the axis, and the battery indicator an emissive LED. Each part reads as its real material under the same light.
A practical workflow
- Select the parts that share a finish and choose a starting material.
- Adjust roughness, coat and colour while watching the highlights on the form.
- Open the advanced settings only for parts that need translucency, anisotropy or effects.
- Save the result to your personal library so the next project starts from it.