How Materials Are Organized

A model can have hundreds of different materials. To manage them more efficiently, we are organizing the materials in the following way:

Texture Groups To make the material list more manageable, we are grouping them by the texture file they use. Most of the time, skin, outfit, accessory, and hair all use different texture maps. So grouping by texture provides a nice separation for different purposes.
Material Categories In addition to the texture grouping, we also attempt to determine the purpose of each material by checking the material and texture names. Based on those purposes, we create categories for easier management of the materials. The categories are:
- Skin: Body, face, arms, and legs fall into this category and they are automatically assigned the skin shader for the best appearance.
- Hair: Hair materials also have their own shader for the best appearances.
- Eyes: Eyes have a different set of default values, like higher gloss.
- Lips: Lips are also assigned with values that are different from standard materials.
- Opaque: Opaque materials that are not in previous categories go here.
- Transparent: Transparent materials that are not in other categories.
- Custom: By default empty but you can assign material to this category and make your custom adjustments to them.

Making adjustments

Material list

You can find the material list from the actor menu. Just go to “Materials” / “Material List” and you’ll see all the materials listed under their texture groups.

Adjustments you can do in the material list:

Group Specific Controls:
- Toggle: Control visibility of the entire group
- Override: If you want the same change to apply to all materials in the group, turn on “Override” and make adjustments in there.
- Share Material: Turn this on to force the entire group to use the same material from the first item. This might improve performance by reducing the overhead of multiple materials. Note that sometimes the individual materials have different settings and using share material in that case may have unexpected results.
Individual Material Control:
- Change category: Change the default category
- Transparency: Change between auto, opaque, and transparent
- Transparent Prepass: This is a technique to address alpha sorting issue. But it has the downside of only allowing the first layer to show. You can turn it off if that’s not desired.
- Transparent Prepass Threshold: Alpha value higher than the threshold will not use the prepass.
- Surface: Adjust color, smoothness, metallic, and glow
- Shadow: Choose whether to drop shadow
- Shadow Threshold: It will only drop shadow if the alpha value is higher than the threshold.

Material Category Controls

Skin With skin materials, you can control the detail map scale, thickness, and sweat effect.
Hair Hair shader has detail map scale and anisotropy (The highlight becomes directional) control

DanceXR checks for certain keywords in the material names and categorizes them into different groups. Like skin, hair, eyes, lips, and everything falls into the “Others” category.

Most of the time, you can simply adjust material settings in the material category configurations without going to the material list and change them one by one.

You can also find all the materials from the list and change them individually if necessary.

New Gradient Control

Allow changing material properties along a gradient path.