Polish and Polymer

Every glossy, rubbery, foamy and lacquered surface a world needs: 31 materials in three styles (realistic, hand-painted stylised and toon) that plug straight into the Swatchbook material library. Version 1.0.3.

Walk into a ring of swatches under studio light. Each material stands on a sphere, a cube, a shader ball, a cylinder, a floor tile and a wall section at true real-world scale, with the reference picture it was made to match hung right beside it. In front of you: a row of curved car body panels in solid red, deep blue metallic whose flakes sparkle one by one in the light, a white pearl that moves between lavender-rose and mint as you walk past, matte wrap, 2×2 twill carbon whose weave flips light and dark along its tows, forged carbon and a toon paint. Beside them stands a kitchen with polished quartz and granite worktops, oak and plain laminate cupboard fronts, a porcelain mug, a cobalt enamel pot and a studded rubber mat.

Click anything and give it a new finish from the picker: everyone in the world sees it change. Switch the whole room between Studio, Daylight, Overcast, Golden Hour, Moonlight and Warm Interior from the toolbar.

What's in the pack (31 materials)

• Plastics: matte ABS plasticMatte, glossy red toy plastic plasticGloss, moulded leather-grain trim plasticTextured, soft-touch coating plasticSoftTouch
• Rubber and foam: worn tyre rubberTyre, studded rubber flooring rubberStuddedFloor, polyurethane foam foamPolyurethane, closed-cell EVA mat foamEVA
• Vinyl: commercial sheet flooring vinylFloor, channel-stitched diner-booth upholstery vinylUpholstery
• Carbon fibre: 2×2 twill carbonTwill and forged carbon carbonForged, both under a deep glossy coat
• Car paint: solid gloss carPaintSolid, sparkling metallic flake carPaintMetallic, colour-shifting pearl carPaintPearl (all with a real clear coat over their own structure) and matte wrap film carPaintMatte
• Ceramic and finishes: speckled stoneware glaze ceramicGlazed, white porcelain porcelainWhite, cobalt vitreous enamel enamelSteel, piano-black lacquer lacquerPiano, cinnabar-red lacquer lacquerRed
• Kitchen surfaces: polished quartz countertopQuartz, polished granite countertopGranitePolished, oak woodgrain laminate laminateWoodgrain, plain matte laminate laminateSolid
• Stylised (hand-painted): teal plastic stylisedPlastic, candy-orange car paint with sparkling flecks stylisedCarPaint, drip-glaze ceramic stylisedCeramic. All three are painted in colour only, so your scene's lights still shade them.
• Toon: cel-shaded plastic toonPlastic, car paint with a painted reflection band toonCarPaint, glazed ceramic toonCeramic

New in 1.0.2: ten clearer names (plasticGlossy → plasticGloss, rubberStudded → rubberStuddedFloor, foamClosedCellMat → foamEVA, vinylSheetFloor → vinylFloor, vinylDinerBooth → vinylUpholstery, ceramicSpeckled → ceramicGlazed, enamelCobalt → enamelSteel, lacquerPianoBlack → lacquerPiano, countertopGranite → countertopGranitePolished, laminatePlain → laminateSolid; saved scenes keep working), search tags on every material, and gallery signs that never cover one another. 1.0.3 is a text-only update.

For creators

Install the syntheticsMaterials package (1.0.3) from ZeroMind and every material appears in your world's material list, picker and swatch gallery for every player, with no setup code. Each one is reached by its name (Materials.apply(thing, "carPaintMetallic"); swap to "carPaintPearl", "stylisedCarPaint" or "toonCarPaint" by changing one word), tagged by kind, style, real tile size, roughness and metal range and texture cost, seamless when tiled, free of shimmer at 30 m, and light on the GPU: 12.2 MB of texture for all 31, at most 5 textures per material, seven of them with none at all. The download is 87 MB, most of it the 31 reference pictures.

Physically based, colours with no light painted in, bumps the right way up, 1 unit = 1 metre. Built on materialLibraryKit 1.3.1 (Swatchbook). In a web browser the gallery ran at about 8 fps when last measured (engine issue #20750).