Cheat sheet: Materials
Various kinds of materials, and where to find them
Summary
Last documented update: January 6 2024 by manavortex
This page contains a brief overview of existing materials. Use the Table of Contents or your browser's search (Hotkey: Ctrl+F) to quickly find what you're looking for. Any links will lead you to additional context.
More and detailed information can be found under Material properties and its nested pages!
Wait, this isn't what I'm looking for!
General information
How it works in the abstract: Textures, Materials and Shaders
Re-using materials as templates: Re-using materials: .mi
How it works in the example: 3d objects: .mesh files
Multilayered
General information: Multilayered: Cyberpunk's supershader
Properties and definition: Multilayered Material: Properties
Preview images: Multilayered: Previews
Hands-on:
Using a textured material (guide)
Simple / Basic materials
PBR material
The default PBR material used in Cyberpunk 2077 is metal_base.remt
If this overfulfills your needs, you can also try out engine\materials\pbr_simple.mt
, which has only color (RGB), Roughness, and Metalness.
White MultilayerMask
You can find a mlmask with three white layers under the following path:
A white mlMask will apply the selected material to the whole surface of the mesh.
Textured Materials
For further details, see Textured (PBR) material properties
| Cyberpunk's default textured (or emissive) material. Super versatile, supports glow and transparency |
| For decals etc., supports alpha channel. Can optionally be made half-transparent (for tattoos etc.) |
| Special effect material that transforms a mesh into an hologram. Can use a custom texture for decal and is color controllable. |
| Basic wood texture, no masks |
Plastic (solid, coloured)
Use engine\materials\metal_base.remt, the example below has been copied from base\environment\architecture\watson\japan_town\building\hotel\motel_notell\room\_plastic_black.mi
BaseColor |
|
Normal | optional: path to your normal map |
Roughness | optional: path to your roughness map |
RoughnessBias | 0.200000003 |
BaseColorScale | Colour as Vector (Wolvenkit shows a color picker) |
Gradient recolor
base\environment\decoration\decals\mesh_decal_lines\textures\lines_plain_black.mi
Cyberspace Materials
| A multilayered material for cyberspace appearances. You can use this as base material to get the Johnny effect. |
| metal_base, but with that fancy blackwall effect that we all know and love. There are blackwall variants of most shaders, check the hint box. |
Metal Materials
| a shiny gold (metal_base.remt) |
Decal materials
| no animation support. Supports recolouring (via color picker), emissive (EV) and gradientMaps as well as transparency via masking. |
| animation support. Supports emissive (via EV), recolouring (numeric), and tiling. |
| no animation support, no emissive, but Diffuse, Normal, Roughness and Metalness, and allows different color assignments for R, G and B channels of |
| unfortunately not used by anything, but supports up to 10 tints! If anyone finds out how the |
Emissive Materials
See Emissive Material Propertiesfor how it works and how to configure it.
| material | description |
|---|---|
| White emissive bright glow (from a fridge) |
| blue/pinkish oscillating glow (from the collar of the jacket V wears in the trailer) |
| A glowing shader with color parameter |
| The standard neon for advertising fonts in Night City. Comes in many colours, can be customized via textures and gradients. Check "city_deco_font" for examples. |
| half-transparent holo material, allows three colours to tint it |
| Use it with any texture for a cool rotating glow shader (it's fun) |
| A glowing shader with RGB color attribute and up to three glowing shades |
Holo Shaders
| material | description |
|---|---|
| Holo material (example .mi) |
| Special effect material that transforms a mesh into a hologram. Can use a custom texture for decal and is color controllable. |
Blackbody Shaders
Blackbody shaders are used for heat. Their colour can be adjusted via the temperature parameter.
| material | description |
|---|---|
| A PBR temperature shader for numeric values, can be used in e.g glowing coal (find files using this for examples) |
| A temperature shader with smoke effects |
| A temperature shader with mlmask and -setup |
| A temperature shader with a texture and a numeric temperature value |
FX Shaders
FX shaders are animated effect shaders.
| material | description |
|---|---|
| A PBR temperature shader. Configured with numeric values. |
| A blackbody shader for e.g. glowing coal. Copy from |
| Oda's helmet shader. Colour is assigned via the lightComponent in the helmet's .ent file |
| Used by female V's electric mantis blades and nothing else |
Something else to dig into: emitters/particleDrawer/meshes
Transparent
Glass
For more details on glass materials and instructions on how to configure them, see here.
Basic glass, with warping properties, simple tint as color, simple opacity |
|
Non-warping glass, destructible, tintable via colors |
|
Device screen glass |
|
Plastic (see-through)
For a full documentation of this material, check Transparent material properties -> Transparent plastic
base\materials\glass_onesided.mt | take from Hanako's dress, |
See-through cloth
For a full documentation of this material, check Transparent material properties -> See-through cloth
base\materials\glass_onesided.mt | take from mana's Barong Tagalog mod, |
Liquid materials
Use base\materials\fillable_fluid_vertex.mt to fill vessels, or see here for details.
Reflective/Mirror-ish materials
Mirrors are generally a farce but here are your options:
metal_base.remtwith roughness set to black and metalness set to white. Quick in-game example here:base\environment\decoration\furniture\bathroom\mirror\mirror_a.meshbase\vehicles\common\materials\glass_tech_reflective.mi: this may seem a little better depending on your use case (for eg car side mirrors). Since the base material is justbase\materials\glass.mt- you'll need to place a black planar mesh behind the mirror mesh so that it isn't see through and adjust theTintColor+GlassSpecularColorto a light-ish grey
Reflections in both the above cases are going to be cubemaps in non-RT graphic modes so they will not be high res or even accurate most of the time (you won't see NPCs for example)
With ray tracing, the reflection will look better and accurate
Below example image use glass_tech_reflective.mi
| Non-ray traced cubemap reflection | Ray traced reflections |
|---|---|
Other materials
Cyberpunk 2077 uses materials cleverly, and often you can save a lot of work by simply re-using something CDPR has already defined
Zipper
You can find a ready-to-use zipper material by copying dec_zipper from base\characters\garment\player_equipment\torso\t1_057_tankbra\t1_057_pwa_tankbra.mesh
Stitches
Find a ready-to use stitches material by copying dec_stitches from base\characters\garment\player_equipment\torso\t1_057_tankbra\t1_057_pwa_tankbra.mesh
This material uses metal_base.remt and can be recoloured via BaseColorScale vector attribute (Wolvenkit will show a color picker)
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