Material (Lower) Panel (Material Explorer)

The lower Material panel of the Material Explorer lets you browse and manage a single material.

• Point-Of-View (POV) Viewport Label Menu > Extended Viewports > Material Explorer > Material (lower) panel
• Default menu: Rendering menu > Material Explorer > Material (lower) panel
• Alt menu: Materials menu > Tools (Material Set) > Material Explorer > Material (lower) panel

Some of the things you can accomplish using the Material panel of the Material Explorer are:

• Browsing the maps assigned to a material
• Replacing a map in a material
• “Cleaning” materials by changing duplicate maps to instances, and by removing unused sub-materials

When you select a material in the upper Scene panel, it appears in the lower Material panel. When you select multiple materials in the upper Scene panel, in general the first material you select is the one that appears in the lower Material panel.

Interface

The Material panel is similar to the Scene panel: there is a window with columns and a menu bar. The main difference is that the lower Material panel shows only one material at a time. (You can use Display buttons for this panel as well, but they aren’t visible by default.)

Like the upper Scene panel, the main portion of the lower Material panel is a window with columns that describe map and material properties. The Material Explorer lets you edit some of the properties in these columns. Columns in the Material panel differ from those in the Scene panel.