# Materials

This article is part of a series of articles about three.js. The first article is three.js fundamentals. If you haven't read that yet and you're new to three.js you might want to consider starting there.

Three.js provides several types of materials. They define how objects will appear in the scene. Which materials you use really depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

There are 2 ways to set most material properties. One at creation time which we've seen before.

    const material = new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial({
      color: 0xFF0000,    // red (can also use a CSS color string here)
      flatShading: true,
    });

The other is after creation

    const material = new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial();
    material.color.setHSL(0, 1, .5);  // red
    material.flatShading = true;

note that properties of type `THREE.Color` have multiple ways to be set.

    material.color.set(0x00FFFF);    // same as CSS's #RRGGBB style
    material.color.set(cssString);   // any CSS color, eg 'purple', '#F32',
                                     // 'rgb(255, 127, 64)',
                                     // 'hsl(180, 50%, 25%)'
    material.color.set(someColor)    // some other THREE.Color
    material.color.setHSL(h, s, l)   // where h, s, and l are 0 to 1
    material.color.setRGB(r, g, b)   // where r, g, and b are 0 to 1

And at creation time you can pass either a hex number or a CSS string

    const m1 = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: 0xFF0000});         // red
    const m2 = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: 'red'});            // red
    const m3 = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: '#F00'});           // red
    const m4 = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: 'rgb(255,0,0)'});   // red
    const m5 = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: 'hsl(0,100%,50%)'}); // red

So let's go over three.js's set of materials.

The `MeshBasicMaterial` is not affected by lights. The `MeshLambertMaterial` computes lighting only at the vertices vs the `MeshPhongMaterial` which computes lighting at every pixel. The `MeshPhongMaterial` also supports specular highlights.

Basic
Lambert
Phong
low-poly models with same materials

The `shininess` setting of the `MeshPhongMaterial` determines the shininess of the specular highlight. It defaults to 30.

shininess: 0
shininess: 30
shininess: 150

Note that setting the `emissive` property to a color on either a `MeshLambertMaterial` or a `MeshPhongMaterial` and setting the `color` to black (and `shininess` to 0 for phong) ends up looking just like the `MeshBasicMaterial`.

Basic
color: 'purple'
Lambert
color: 'black'
emissive: 'purple'
Phong
color: 'black'
emissive: 'purple'
shininess: 0

Why have all 3 when `MeshPhongMaterial` can do the same things as `MeshBasicMaterial` and `MeshLambertMaterial`? The reason is the more sophisticated material takes more GPU power to draw. On a slower GPU like say a mobile phone you might want to reduce the GPU power needed to draw your scene by using one of the less complex materials. It also follows that if you don't need the extra features then use the simplest material. If you don't need the lighting and the specular highlight then use the `MeshBasicMaterial`.

The `MeshToonMaterial` is similar to the `MeshPhongMaterial` with one big difference. Rather than shading smoothly it uses a gradient map (an X by 1 texture) to decide how to shade. The default uses a gradient map that is 70% brightness for the first 70% and 100% after but you can supply your own gradient map. This ends up giving a 2 tone look that looks like a cartoon.

Next up there are 2 physically based rendering materials. Physically Based Rendering is often abbreviated PBR.

The materials above use simple math to make materials that look 3D but they aren't what actually happens in real world. The 2 PBR materials use much more complex math to come close to what actually happens in the real world.

The first one is `MeshStandardMaterial`. The biggest difference between `MeshPhongMaterial` and `MeshStandardMaterial` is it uses different parameters. `MeshPhongMaterial` had a `shininess` setting. `MeshStandardMaterial` has 2 settings `roughness` and `metalness`.

At a basic level `roughness` is the opposite of `shininess`. Something that has a high roughness, like a baseball doesn't have hard reflections whereas something that's not rough, like a billiard ball, is very shiny. Roughness goes from 0 to 1.

The other setting, `metalness`, says how metal the material is. Metals behave differently than non-metals. 0 for non-metal and 1 for metal.

Here's a quick sample of `MeshStandardMaterial` with `roughness` from 0 to 1 across and `metalness` from 0 to 1 down.

The `MeshPhysicalMaterial` is same as the `MeshStandardMaterial` but it adds a `clearcoat` parameter that goes from 0 to 1 for how much to apply a clearcoat gloss layer and a `clearCoatRoughness` parameter that specifies how rough the gloss layer is.

Here's the same grid of `roughness` by `metalness` as above but with `clearcoat` and `clearCoatRoughness` settings.

The various standard materials progress from fastest to slowest `MeshBasicMaterial` ➡ `MeshLambertMaterial` ➡ `MeshPhongMaterial` ➡ `MeshStandardMaterial` ➡ `MeshPhysicalMaterial`. The slower materials can make more realistic looking scenes but you might need to design your code to use the faster materials on low powered or mobile machines.

There are 3 materials that have special uses. `ShadowMaterial` is used to get the data created from shadows. We haven't covered shadows yet. When we do we'll use this material to take a peek at what's happening behind the scenes.

The `MeshDepthMaterial` renders the depth of each pixel where pixels at negative `near` of the camera are 0 and negative `far` are 1. Certain special effects can use this data which we'll get into at another time.

The `MeshNormalMaterial` will show you the normals of geometry. Normals are the direction a particular triangle or pixel faces. `MeshNormalMaterial` draws the view space normals (the normals relative to the camera). x is red, y is green, and z is blue so things facing to the right will be pink, to the left will be aqua, up will be light green, down will be purple, and toward the screen will be lavender.

`ShaderMaterial` is for making custom materials using the three.js shader system. `RawShaderMaterial` is for making entirely custom shaders with no help from three.js. Both of these topics are large and will be covered later.

Most materials share a bunch of settings all defined by `Material`. See the docs for all of them but let's go over two of the most commonly used properties.

`flatShading`: whether or not the object looks faceted or smooth. default = `false`.

flatShading: false
flatShading: true

`side`: which sides of triangles to show. The default is `THREE.FrontSide`. Other options are `THREE.BackSide` and `THREE.DoubleSide` (both sides). Most 3D objects drawn in three are probably opaque solids so the back sides (the sides facing inside the solid) do not need to be drawn. The most common reason to set `side` is for planes or other non-solid objects where it is common to see the back sides of triangles.

Here are 6 planes drawn with `THREE.FrontSide` and `THREE.DoubleSide`.

side: THREE.FrontSide
side: THREE.DoubleSide

There's really a lot to consider with materials and we actually still have a bunch more to go. In particular we've mostly ignored textures which open up a whole slew of options. Before we cover textures though we need to take a break and cover setting up your development environment

### material.needsUpdate

This topic rarely affects most three.js apps but just as an FYI... Three.js applies material settings when a material is used where "used" means "something is rendered that uses the material". Some material settings are only applied once as changing them requires lots of work by three.js. In those cases you need to set `material.needsUpdate = true` to tell three.js to apply your material changes. The most common settings that require you to set `needsUpdate` if you change the settings after using the material are:

- `flatShading`
- adding or removing a texture

  Changing a texture is ok, but if want to switch from using no texture to using a texture or from using a texture to using no texture then you need to set `needsUpdate = true`.

  In the case of going from texture to no-texture it is often just better to use a 1x1 pixel white texture.

As mentioned above most apps never run into these issues. Most apps do not switch between flat shaded and non flat shaded. Most apps also either use textures or a solid color for a given material, they rarely switch from using one to using the other.