materials-and-shaderslisted

# Materials and Shaders ## Purpose Materials decide how surfaces respond to light. Most material problems are one of three things: physically implausible inputs, textures interpreted in the wrong colour space, or a shader that costs far more than its author realised. This skill covers authoring and diagnosing them, engine-neutrally. Shader languages and node systems are platform-specific; the platform skills cover those. ## When to use - Authoring materials for a new asset or environment. - A surface looks wrong under light — plastic when it should be metal, flat when it should have depth, wrong colour under some lighting but not others. - Writing or modifying shader code. - Shader compilation or build times have grown unreasonably. - Draw calls are high because of material variety. ## When NOT to use - The scene's lighting is the problem. Use `lighting-design`. Distinguish them by checking whether the material is wrong under *all* lighting or only this one. - Fundamentals are unestablished. Use `rendering-fundamentals` first. - Full-screen effects. Use `post-processing`. - Particle and effect authoring. Use `vfx-and-particles`. ## Required context | Fact | Why it matters | |---|---| | Renderer, pipeline and version | Shaders do not port between pipelines | | Shading model in use | Standard PBR, or something custom, changes every input's meaning | | Texture import settings | sRGB versus linear is the most common source of subtle wrongness | | Target platform | Mo