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Creating Your Material library

Imagine for a second that you were able to search through all of your materials that you’ve downloaded or made in the past. All of them created with a perfect tumble, and with tags and descriptions that allow you to easily search them. That’s exactly what Shade has built out. However, we need your help to make sure we get it right. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get started.

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Naming Conventions and Directory Structure

Unfortunately, Shade can’t perfectly detect what is a normal map or displacement map, so we rely on a wide variety of detection algorithms to find it from the filename. Here is a list of a few names we probe for:

Note - all of the names are case insensitive

Note - a material should be in one directory at a time. At this moment, Shade only supports discovering one material per directory structure. Here is a screenshot of a well-formed texture directory (grabbed from AmbientCG):

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Viewing Your Material library

As Shade detects more materials, Shade will automatically add them to your 3D section in the sidebar. You will see a materials tab, with descriptions, tags and previews for all of your textures.

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Viewing The Maps, Descriptions, and Tags

Once you’ve indexed a material, you’ll be able to click on the material in Shade, view it in search results, and see its descriptions and tags.

If you need to use this material - simply open it in its folder, and grab all of the maps you need.

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Creating Your Material library

Imagine for a second that you were able to search through all of your materials that you’ve downloaded or made in the past. All of them created with a perfect tumble, and with tags and descriptions that allow you to easily search them. That’s exactly what Shade has built out. However, we need your help to make sure we get it right. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get started.

​
Naming Conventions and Directory Structure

Unfortunately, Shade can’t perfectly detect what is a normal map or displacement map, so we rely on a wide variety of detection algorithms to find it from the filename. Here is a list of a few names we probe for:

Note - all of the names are case insensitive

Note - a material should be in one directory at a time. At this moment, Shade only supports discovering one material per directory structure. Here is a screenshot of a well-formed texture directory (grabbed from AmbientCG):

​
Viewing Your Material library

As Shade detects more materials, Shade will automatically add them to your 3D section in the sidebar. You will see a materials tab, with descriptions, tags and previews for all of your textures.

​
Viewing The Maps, Descriptions, and Tags

Once you’ve indexed a material, you’ll be able to click on the material in Shade, view it in search results, and see its descriptions and tags.

If you need to use this material - simply open it in its folder, and grab all of the maps you need.