Material suggestions

Formats that keep their textures beside the model, principally FBX and OBJ, often arrive with materials that are incomplete or empty. A folder may hold a base colour, a normal map, a roughness map, and an occlusion map for the same surface while the file itself references one of them or none.

Solidly scans the folder beside the model, groups the loose images into candidate materials, and offers them in the Materials tab as Suggested Materials.

Suggestions are offered for FBX and OBJ only. glTF, GLB, STL, PLY, and USD either carry their texture references completely or have no material objects to attach them to.

How a suggestion is built

Each image is classified by channel, covering base colour, normal, roughness, metallic, occlusion, emissive, and opacity, from its file name where the name is conventional and from its pixel content where it is not.

The classified images are then grouped into bundles that plausibly belong to one surface, and each bundle is matched against the materials the file declares, so a suggestion arrives already pointing at the material it is most likely meant for.

Applying a suggestion

Each suggestion appears as a card in the Suggested Materials section, showing its textures and, where one was found, the material it is suggested for. There are two ways to apply one:

• Merge Suggested on the card binds the suggestion's textures to the material it targets.
• Dragging the suggestion's card onto a surface in the viewport applies it to that surface's material.

An applied suggestion moves into an applied list rather than disappearing, so it stays visible as a record of what was attached. A suggestion that is not wanted can be archived so that it stops being offered.

Merging a suggestion is an ordinary edit: it takes effect in the viewport immediately, it can be undone with ⌘Z, and it is written to the file when the model is saved. For FBX, applying a suggestion that carries a metallic or roughness map to a Lambert or Phong material gives that material metallic and roughness controls, and the maps are written to the standard FBX slots other applications read. An occlusion map in the suggestion is used in the viewport, and because FBX has no occlusion property the saved file does not reference it. Solidly copies the image alongside the model and reports both outcomes in a notification when the file is saved. See Saving and exporting.

The automatic pass

By default, Solidly runs the grouping pass when a model with loose textures is selected and reports its progress in the notification area. Suggest Materials Automatically in Settings ▸ General ▸ When a Model Opens turns that off, which stops new suggestions being built. Suggestions the loader already found remain, and applying one by hand is unaffected.