Materials and folders

How folders work, every PBR control and its range, texture limits, and what renaming or moving a folder does to a live configurator.

The materials library is where you build the swatches a customer chooses between. It has two levels: folders at the root, and the materials inside them.

A folder is more than a filing device, and it pays to know why before you create anything.

A folder is a swatch set, and it is also the thing you assign

The root screen says it, and the sentence rewards a second read:

Each folder is a swatch set — assign a folder to a part of a 3D model and every material in it becomes an option.

That is the whole model. A folder does two jobs at once:

• It groups materials so you can find them.
• It is the unit you attach to a part of a model on the Material groups tab. Attach the folder Oak veneers to the seat of a barstool and the customer gets every material in Oak veneers as a swatch on that seat. Not a list you curated separately. The folder itself.

The consequence is the single most important thing on this page: reorganising the library changes what shoppers see. Moving a material from Oak veneers into Plastic removes it from every part bound to Oak veneers and adds it to every part bound to Plastic. Filing is a product-configuration change wearing the clothes of a tidying job. Vysora says as much in the bulk bar, where the warning under Move to folder… reads also changes which parts show them.

Three rules follow from the way folders are stored.

A material belongs to exactly one folder. There is no way to put one swatch in two sets. If Oak Natural needs to appear both on a wood-framed chair and on a wood-topped table that offer different ranges, duplicate the material and file each copy in its own folder.

Empty folders cannot exist. A folder is nothing more than a name shared by a set of materials, so it comes into being when its first material is saved and disappears when the last one leaves. The New folder dialog says this outright: Folders are just a shared name — this one appears once you save its first material.

Unfiled is not a real folder. It is where every material with no folder ends up. It always sorts last, and it has no Rename button. If a part is bound to nothing and your swatches are sitting in Unfiled, no customer will ever see them.

Creating a material

New material in the top bar opens the editor. If you have a folder open at the time, that folder is pre-filled for you.

Two fields establish identity:

• Name — required. Create material stays disabled until there is something in it. Name swatches the way a customer would read them: Oak Natural, Plastic Light Grey.
• Folder — the dropdown offers — none —, then each existing folder, then ＋ New folder… at the bottom. Its own helper explains the stakes: the swatch set this belongs to — a 3D part assigned this folder shows every material in it. e.g. Fabric, Oak veneers.

The PBR controls

Everything below the identity fields describes how the surface behaves in light. The sphere on the right updates live. It is a fast approximation rather than a full render, and it is drawn as a sphere on purpose, because a sphere shows the roughness falloff and the specular hotspot that a flat chip cannot.

Two of them have a catch.

Emissive needs a colour. Ticking the box leaves the emissive colour at black, and black emits nothing. Pick an actual colour after you tick it, or the material will look exactly as it did before.

Opacity does not bend light. As soon as you drop below full opacity the editor tells you what it will and will not do:

Renders as tinted / frosted glass. Vysora doesn't simulate refraction yet, so this won't bend what's behind it — good for coloured glass, acrylic and sheer fabric, not for gems.

Slider values read as 0.0, 0.7, 1.0 and so on — two decimal places with one trailing zero trimmed. There is no control here for ambient occlusion, clearcoat, sheen, IOR, transmission or double-sidedness. Those are not part of this screen.

Textures

Two texture slots sit below the sliders.

A normal map is what separates convincing fabric from vinyl and convincing wood from laminate. Without one, every surface is perfectly smooth no matter what colour it is.

Every texture is stored at one fixed specification:

You don't have to prepare files to that specification yourself. Picking a file in either slot opens Prepare texture (Prepare normal map for the second slot), which turns what you picked into a file that fits. Any image your browser can open works: a phone photo, a 4096 × 4096 scan, a WebP from a texture site. Nothing is uploaded until you press Use texture.

Preparing a texture

The preview opens on Tiled 2×2: four copies of the result side by side, the way it repeats across a sofa. Seams and light falloff that you can't see in a single image are obvious here. Single shows one copy. Original shows the file you picked, with the part a square crop cuts away shaded.

The box under the controls shows the file that will be uploaded, for example 1024 × 1024 · JPG · 146 KB. Studio picks the highest JPG quality that stays under 400 KB, and drops to 512 px by itself if a very detailed image won't fit at 1024.

A file that already meets the specification, with nothing switched on, shows Already fits and goes up byte for byte when you press Use original.

WebP is always converted. Studio can read it, but the configurator's 3D engine can't, so a WebP texture would upload without complaint and then never appear in the player.

Keeping a base colour and its normal map aligned

Making a texture seamless crops and blends it. A base colour and its normal map only line up if both get exactly the same treatment, so Studio remembers how each slot was prepared. When you add the second map, Prepare normal map opens with the first one's size, shape and seamless settings already set, and says Matched to the base-colour texture's size and seamless settings, so the two line up. Leave those settings alone. This relies on both files starting at the same dimensions, which is how texture sets are normally delivered.

Editing a texture you already uploaded

Once a slot holds a texture, Edit sits next to Replace. It opens the stored file in Prepare texture. Use it to make an older texture seamless. Everything starts switched off, because the stored file may already be seamless and blending it a second time softens it.

Textures on a new material

On a brand-new material you can pick a texture before the material exists. After Use texture it is previewed straight away, but the file itself is held back until you press the button. The helper under the slot says Uploads when you press Create material. If that upload fails for any reason, the material is still saved; the editor reopens on it with the error and you can retry the upload.

Under the sphere preview, a small flat chip appears once a base-colour texture is attached. That chip shows the texture at your current tiling values without the sphere's distortion, so use it rather than the sphere when you are setting tiling.

The number of texture files you can store is capped by your plan. A texture that cannot be stored surfaces as an upload error.

Duplicating a material

Duplicate is the fastest way to build a range: one Oak Natural, then a duplicate at a darker base colour for Oak Smoked.

Three things to know before you rely on it:

• It copies what is on screen, including edits you have not saved. It is not "save, then copy". The original is left exactly as it was unless you also press Save changes.
• The name is auto-incremented. Bronze becomes Bronze 2, and Bronze 2 becomes Bronze 3. A name that happens to end in a number is treated as a counter, so Oak 2024 duplicates to Oak 2025. Rename the copy if that is not what you wanted.
• The texture is shared, not copied. A duplicate costs nothing against your texture quota. If you later upload a new texture onto the copy, it gets its own file — you cannot overwrite the original's texture by editing a duplicate.

After duplicating, the editor switches to the new copy, so the next thing you edit is the duplicate and not the original.

Renaming a folder

Rename sits on each folder card at the root view. There is no rename from inside an open folder and none from the material editor. Unfiled cannot be renamed.

The rename itself is instant and complete: every material in the folder picks up the new name at once. What it does not do is reach a configurator you have already published.

Moving materials between folders

Turn on Select outside the root view, click the cards you want, and the bulk bar appears. Move to folder… gives you a field with autocomplete over the existing folder names; typing a name that does not exist creates it. The inline warning, also changes which parts show them, is the point of the whole page restated at the moment it matters.

Show all materials is useful here. It ignores folders entirely and shows one flat grid, which is the easiest way to see what has drifted into Unfiled.

Search works across every folder regardless of where you are standing, and matches on the material name or its folder name. The grid pages 24 materials at a time, with a Load {n} more button when there are more.

A bulk operation handles up to 500 materials at once.

Deleting

A material is deleted from its editor footer. Delete arms it, Confirm delete does it. In bulk, Delete in the selection bar becomes Delete {n}, with the warning permanent — configurators using them will lose the material.

Nothing checks usage first. Each material card shows Used by {n} products, but neither the single delete nor the bulk delete reads that number or warns you about it. Look at the count before you delete, because there is no undo, no trash and no version history anywhere in this screen.

A folder has no delete control, and does not need one. Empty it — move every material out, or delete them — and the folder disappears from the root view on its own. Materials left with no folder fall into Unfiled.

Nothing here announces success

Vysora Studio has no toasts and no confirmation messages. A successful save closes the editor, a successful move closes the bulk bar, and the grid re-renders. Silence means it worked.

Next

Once you have at least one folder with materials in it, you can attach it to a part of a model — see Making parts recolourable.