Multi-Material Projects

A material is one node graph within a project, and one .surfacelabs project can hold several. The Material Library panel lists them.

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The Material Library panel listing several materials, with the active one highlighted and the Add Material button and delete control visible.

• Tap a material to switch to it. The live graph is snapshotted into the material you are leaving, so nothing is lost. An in-progress subgraph edit is committed and exited first, so the snapshot is of the material rather than the subgraph you were inside.
• Add Material creates an empty material, named after its position in the list.
• ✕ deletes a material. The control is disabled for the currently active material and when only one material remains.

Reusing one material inside another

The Material node imports another material from the same project as a whole map set on one wire. Import evaluates the source once and embeds its channel maps as ordinary project media, so the node holds no live link: the project stays self-contained and behaves the same in the app, headless and over MCP. Re-import pulls changes across; a channel the source did not resolve is left absent and falls back to that channel’s neutral. Importing the material you are currently editing is allowed, and the importing node is excluded from its own source so it cannot bake a graph that reads back through itself.

Because it is a material source, it wires wherever a PBR Output’s Material port does: a Trim Sheet slot, or another PBR Output’s Material input.

Several outputs in one material

A material may hold more than one PBR Output. The 3D preview shows the terminal one (whichever feeds nothing), and you can point it at a different one with Visualize in that node’s context menu.

Wiring a material into a PBR Output’s Material input fills the channels you did not wire yourself. An explicitly wired per-channel input is more specific and wins, so a trim sheet plus a hand-authored height map behaves the way it reads. Preview and export resolve channels in the same order, so the two can never disagree.

Storage

The active material’s graph and the inactive materials are all stored inside the same project archive. See File formats for how the archive is laid out.