Materials
Import materials with automatic texture discovery and live 3D preview
When you import a material file, AssetHoard automatically searches for associated textures and displays a live 3D preview on a sphere.
Supported Formats
| Format | Extension | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Wavefront Material | .mtl | Standard format used with OBJ models |
| MaterialX | .mtlx | Industry-standard material exchange format |
| Unity Material | .mat | Unity engine material files |
| Substance Archive | .sbsar | Compiled Substance Designer materials |
| Substance Source | .sbs | Substance Designer project files |
Texture Structures
1. Referenced Textures
First, we read the material file itself to find any textures it explicitly references.
For example, an MTL file might specify map_Kd wood_diffuse.png — we'll look
for that exact file.
2. Directory Search
We then search for texture files in multiple locations:
- Same folder as the material file
textures/subfolder (e.g.,materials/textures/)- Sibling
textures/folder (e.g., if your material is inmaterials/, we checktextures/at the same level)
3. Smart Pattern Matching
Texture files are automatically classified by their naming convention. We recognize common industry-standard suffixes (case-insensitive):
| Texture Type | Recognized Patterns |
|---|---|
| Diffuse/Albedo | _diffuse, _albedo, _basecolor, _color, _d |
| Normal | _normal, _nrm, _n, _normalmap |
| Roughness | _roughness, _rough, _r |
| Metallic | _metallic, _metal, _metalness, _m |
| Ambient Occlusion | _ao, _occlusion, _ambient_occlusion |
| Height/Displacement | _height, _displacement, _bump, _h |
| Emissive | _emissive, _emission, _emit |
Example
If you have this folder structure:
my_materials/├── wood.mtl└── textures/├── wood_diffuse.png├── wood_normal.png└── wood_roughness.pngAssetHoard will import wood.mtl as a material asset, find the textures/ subfolder, recognize each texture by its suffix, and display a 3D sphere with all three
PBR maps applied.