Materials and textures

Two panels handle this: the Asset Browser and the Material Browser. Earlier builds had a separate texture browser, but it was absorbed into the asset browser and only the two remain.

Asset browser

The bottom-left panel by default. Shows the project’s assets/ directory as a tree on the left and a tile grid of the current folder on the right. Image files (png, jpg, jpeg, bmp, tga, webp, ktx2) render as thumbnails; everything else shows a generic file tile.

What you do here:

• Click an image to preview it in the side panel (KTX2 arrays show a layer slider).
• Drag an image tile onto a brush face in the viewport to apply it as the face’s texture_path. This routes through the ApplyTextureOp operator, so it goes on the undo stack.
• Drag a .glb into the viewport to spawn a model entity.
• Drag a .jsn to open it.
• Drop new files into assets/ from your file manager. Bevy’s file_watcher is on in the templates, so they show up without a manual refresh.

If you only need a texture and no PBR parameters, this is the path. The “texture browser” that older docs and tutorials mention is just this panel filtered to images.

Material browser

A sibling panel for named PBR materials: bundles of textures plus material parameters (metallic, roughness, normal strength, parallax) registered in the MaterialRegistry resource. Use this when one texture isn’t enough, or when you want to share material settings across many brushes.

Auto-detection

If you drop a folder of textures named consistently (e.g. brick_albedo.png, brick_normal.png, brick_roughness.png), the material browser groups them into one auto-detected entry. The regex driving detection is pbr_filename_regex in src/material_browser.rs; it recognises common suffixes (_albedo, _diffuse, _normal, _n, _roughness, _r, _metallic, _m, _ao, _height, _displacement).

You can edit the resulting material in the inspector. Material values serialize into the scene’s JsnAssets table (or the project-wide catalog) keyed by bevy_pbr::StandardMaterial and ride along with save.

Applying

Select a brush face, drop a material onto it. The face’s material_name field takes priority over its texture_path, so a face with both falls back gracefully if the material is missing.

Preview

Each definition renders onto a sphere via a render-to-texture pipeline (src/material_preview.rs). Previews use RenderLayers::layer(1) so they don’t clash with main-view geometry.

Project-wide vs scene-local materials

Two storage tiers:

• Scene-local: the material lives only inside the current .jsn. References use #Name.
• Project-wide: it lives in .jsn/catalog.jsn (legacy fallback assets/catalog.jsn) and any scene in the project can reference it. References use @Name.

The browser shows both, with the source labelled.

Common gotchas

• Texture didn’t show up after I dropped it in. Bevy’s watcher catches new files but only existing scenes reload their materials. Re-select the brush face to refresh.
• The auto-detect groups two unrelated textures. Filename heuristics are coarse. Rename the files or open the affected definition and split it manually.
• Material disappears in the standalone build. Standalone loads assets/scene.jsn plus .jsn/catalog.jsn. Scene-local materials still ship inline; project references resolve from the catalog at load time, so a missing catalog file causes @Name references to fall back to defaults.