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Hypershade

Hypershade is the Designer's node-graph material editor. It is named after Maya's panel of the same role for parity reasons: same mental model, simpler scope.

Open

Hypershade > Open Hypershade… or Window > Hypershade. The panel opens as a tab; drag its title bar to dock.

Layout

  • Node graph (left, large): nodes + connections. Drag from a node's output port to another node's input port.
  • Node library (right, narrow): searchable list of node kinds.
  • Preview (bottom): a small live-rendered sphere or your selected geometry showing the active material.

Node kinds

The library groups nodes into folders:

Folder Nodes
Inputs Color, Float, Vector, Texture, Procedural Texture (Noise, Voronoi, Checker)
Math Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Lerp, Clamp, Pow, Smoothstep
Color Mix, Hue/Saturation, Levels, Gamma
Geometry UV, Normal, Position, Tangent
Lighting Fresnel, Layer Weight (view-angle blend)
Output PBR Surface (the final node)

A material is a graph terminating in one PBR Surface node.

A minimum material

The simplest material is one PBR Surface node with an Albedo color input:

  1. Drag PBR Surface from the library to the graph.
  2. Drag Color to the graph; pick a hex value.
  3. Connect Color's out to PBR Surface's albedo port.
  4. Assign the material: right-click the PBR Surface > Assign to Selection.

The selected Mesh3D placement now renders with that color.

Common patterns

Texture into albedo

  1. Texture node → set its file path.
  2. Connect its rgb to PBR Surface's albedo.

The Mesh3D's UV is used by default; override by adding a UV node in front.

Roughness from a grayscale texture

  1. Texture node with a grayscale roughness map.
  2. Connect its r (just the red channel) to PBR Surface's roughness.

Fresnel-driven specular

  1. Fresnel node with an exponent of 5.
  2. Connect to PBR Surface's specular_intensity.

The surface gets glossier at grazing angles. Useful for car paint or iridescent wings.

Live preview

The bottom preview sphere updates every node change. If your material has UV-mapped textures, the sphere shows them spherically mapped; toggle the preview shape to Selected to see the material on your actual geometry.

Saving materials

Hypershade > Save Material As… writes the material's node graph to a .elymaterial file (JSON, similar in spirit to .elybrush). Reuse across projects via Load Material….

Limitations (v1)

  • Subsurface scattering is not exposed as a node; use the SSS attributes on the PBR Surface directly.
  • No volumetric / emissive node graph in v1; PBR Surface's emissive input handles solid color emission only.
  • No custom shader code injection; node-graph only.

See also