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.
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
Color / Albedo Maps
Color
COL
map
ALB
ALBEDO
Normal Maps / Diffuse Maps
Normal
NORM
NRM
DIFF
DIF
Diffuse
Normal_GL
Normal_DX
NRML
NRMAL
Displacement Maps / Bump Maps
Bump
BMP
DISP
Displacement
DISPLACE
Metalness Maps
Metalness
Metal
MTL
AO Maps
AO
Ambient
OCCLUSION
OCCL
Specular Maps
SPEC
SPECULAR
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):
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.
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.