Materials describe how a modelled surface will appear in the game. They specify a range of configurations and resources including classic material properties, textures and shaders.

Material Naming

A material name consists of a creator supplied given name and a material type suffix. The material type is one of a set of supported types eg. 'm.onetex'. All material types begin with 'm.' The material type is manually appended to the name of the material within the creation program eg. 3D Studio Max, it is not implied by the configuration of the material.

The creator supplied given name should begin with a letter and contain only english letters, numbers, dash and underscore characters. Material names in Trainz are not case sensitive. The names will be converted to lowercase internally, even if the original name from the creation program (ie. 3DS Max, Blender) contained mixed case or was case sensitive.

The same material name may be used by different models intented to be used together, in fact this allows the materials to be efficiently shared. An example valid material name is: brickwall.m.tbumptex

For more info about configuring materials see Exporting with 3D Studio Max.