Materials

Materials

A material is the .bin record that tells the game which shader to draw a mesh with, which textures to bind, and how to blend it — this is where you change a texture, retint something, or fix a mesh that draws wrong. Materials are edited in two places: the material editor in the inspector (one material at a time, with a live preview), and the Materials window (Tools ▸ Materials…), which sees the whole map at once.

The material editor

The inspector's material editor shows one material in sections:

• General — the shader (autocomplete lists the shader family the material is actually drawn with — static-mesh shaders for a map material, skinned-mesh shaders for a character one — plus anything the file itself already uses, since the two families are fed by different draw paths and crossing them makes the game report a missing shader constant and draw nothing; a file that already carries a crossed shader says so on open, and picking from the other family is still allowed but never silent), and the UV transform: scale and offset, written into the material's own UV parameters so undo and the live preview treat it like any parameter edit. The shader must actually read those parameters for tiling to apply in game (most tiling shaders do). Use . as the decimal separator.
• Samplers — every bound texture with a thumbnail, the path (editable, Enter applies), the sampler's address mode, and Open / Copy / Replace Texture / remove. A warning mark means the path resolves nowhere in the project or references; ? means the current shader declares no sampler by that name and will ignore it. Chips list samplers the selected shader supports but the material does not bind yet.
• Render State — the real .bin fields: back-face culling, alpha blending, source and destination blend factors.
• Derived — read-only values the game computes (depth write, alpha cutout, two-sided lighting) with hints naming the field that drives each one. The editor applies the game's depth rules rather than a kinder version of them; a blend factor that reads the framebuffer's alpha is what made ported decals render black in game, and the editor now shows that instead of hiding it.
• Switches & Macros — feature switches, and shaderMacros defines. Macros select precompiled shader permutations: the panel says what the shader will actually do with each define, an unsupported combination can crash the game, and removing a macro is not the same as unticking it (absent means the shader's own default applies).
• Parameters — every numeric parameter, editable, with colour swatches for tint-like values and the ability to add or remove parameters.
• Advanced — copy name, revert this material, and Use most-used Riot material setup: loads real materials from the installed patch and applies the most frequent parameter / switch / macro / render-state combination for this shader, keeping your texture paths.

The Live checkbox pushes every edit to the viewport automatically; Apply (preview) does it once; Save To Override persists to the project; Revert All discards. The material ball is a live preview of the diffuse on a lit sphere through the UV transform — for the true in-game look use the D3D11 renderer.

A champion's materials have one more section, runtime states — see Character Editor.

The Materials window

Tools ▸ Materials… lists every material in the open map with the meshes using it, its textures, and what is wrong with it: missing materials, uncooked permutations, unresolved textures. Filters narrow the list to Only used and Only with findings.

• Capture / Apply copies one material's look onto many: tick what to carry — Shader, Samplers, Parameters, Switches, Render state, Macros — capture the source, tick the targets, and apply. The list shows exactly what will change before it changes. One undoable operation.
• Select meshes selects in the viewport every mesh that draws the material; Open in editor jumps to it in the inspector.
• Repair fixes what the findings describe where a fix is mechanical.
• Remove unused strips every material no mesh in the map draws, in one go. The list is shown first with ticks to narrow it, and the old materials.bin is backed up under the project's .reyengine/cleanup/ before anything is written.

Bulk shader work

From the inspector's document-wide controls: Bulk material setup applies each shader's most-used Riot setup to every material in the file at once, and Bulk shader replace swaps one shader for another on every material using it, keeping compatible authored values.

The shader catalogue the editor reads comes from the installed game (Live and PBE differ) and refreshes itself when the client updates.

The second UV set

Tools ▸ Second UV (Texcoord7)… shows and edits a mesh's second UV channel — the one lightmaps and several terrain shaders read. Scale and offset it, rewrite it, apply to the listed meshes or only the viewport selection, and draw Texcoord0 behind it for comparison. A mesh imported from .scb, .sco, .fbx or similar carries no Texcoord7 at all, and the client skips the draw of a lightmapped material without it — the editor can add the channel to a selected mesh without an atlas or a bake.

Editing bins as text

Any .bin — a materials bin included — opens as ritobin text under Tools ▸ Edit Bin as Text (ritobin)…. See Tools and Mod Health.