Basic 3D Materials

Basic materials are the plain, solid surfaces you reach for first: a single color (or an image) on a shape, a model or 3D text, with no animation or procedural pattern on top. What sets the six apart is how they respond to light. One ignores it completely, two treat it the way real surfaces do, two use older and simpler lighting, and one turns shading into flat cartoon bands.

The six lighting models

• Basic is unlit. The color you pick is the color you see, from every angle, whatever lights are in the scene. No shading, no highlights.
• Standard is physically based. Two sliders, Roughness and Metalness, describe almost any everyday surface: matte plaster, satin plastic, brushed or polished metal.
• Physical is Standard plus the extra layers real objects have: a clearcoat over the paint, light passing through (Transmission and IOR), the soft sheen of fabric and the rainbow film of iridescence.
• Phong is the classic shiny model: a diffuse color plus a sharp highlight whose tightness you set with Shininess and whose tint you set with the Specular color.
• Lambert is purely matte. Light falls off smoothly across the form and there is never a highlight.
• Toon splits light into hard steps instead of a smooth gradient, the look of cel animation and comics.

How to choose

Start from what the surface should read as. For anything meant to look real, a product, furniture, a floor, a logo in brushed steel, use Standard; it is the default for a reason and responds correctly to the scene lights and environment. Move to Physical only when the object needs a layer Standard cannot give it: car paint with a lacquer, a glass bottle, velvet, a soap bubble. It costs more to draw, so keep it for the hero object.

For graphic, illustrative scenes, choose by style. Basic is right for flat shapes, labels and anything that must keep an exact brand color regardless of lighting; it is also the cheapest material to render, useful when a scene holds hundreds of objects. Toon gives characters and objects an animated-series look. Lambert and Phong suit low-poly and retro 3D, Lambert when you want soft matte forms, Phong when you want the bright plastic highlight of early 3D games.

Settings they share

Every basic material has a Color, an Opacity slider (with transparency on) and a wireframe switch, and accepts image textures for color and transparency. The lit ones (all but Basic) take an Emissive color with Emissive Intensity, which makes part or all of the surface glow without needing a light. Standard and Physical add maps for roughness, metalness, bumps and real surface displacement, so a photo-scanned texture set can be dropped straight in.

For surfaces with a look of their own rather than a lighting model, see the dedicated families: glass, metal and plastic are ready-made, tuned presets built on the same physically based lighting.