Default material library

Basic materials

These materials come in handy when you just need something simple & lightweight

Basic - Diffuse: uses the decal image as the diffuse color
Basic - Emission: uses the decal image as the emission color
Basic - Shadeless: always at full brightness when viewed directly, but produces no light otherwise

Chroma key materials

In these materials, transparency is determined by the proximity to a specified mask color (image's alpha channel is ignored)

Chroma Key - Diffuse: outputs diffuse color
Chroma Key - Emission: outputs emission color

Stencil materials

These materials treat the decal image as containing only a single channel (alpha and grayscale value are multiplied together) which controls the transparency and, in some cases, interpreted as a bumpmap / heightmap

Stencil - Diffuse: outputs diffuse color
Stencil - Emission: outputs emission color
Stencil - Bump: uses the Bump node to convert the single-channel values into normals
Stencil - Bevel: calculates normals from the gradient of single-channel values (uses fixed-step differences in X and Y directions). This way, it's possible to make the effect more pronounced than is achievable with the Bump node.
Stencil - Bevel Damaged: similar to Stencil - Bevel, but has additional parameters for a procedural damage to the stencil.
Stencil - Normal: uses the addon's heightmap-to-normalmap converter which creates a separate normalmap image out of the decal image. Though it's not real-time, this approach provides higher-quality results than Stencil - Bevel material

<aside> 🚧 For stencil materials, you can adjust (and even invert) the range of texture’s grayscale intensities that will be mapped to 0…1 range, using the Remap (Bias and Range) parameters.

</aside>

<aside> 🚧 If you find the effect of Stencil - Bevel hardly noticeable, first try increasing the UV Radius, and after that adjust the Bevel Scale and/or the Remap parameters.

</aside>

<aside> 🚧 Bump/Bevel/Normal materials are intended to be used in embedded decals. If embedding does not work, please check your node setup: the BSDF/shader node(s) connected to the output need to be in the main material's node tree, and not inside a node group. If they are inside a node group, its contents would need to be ungrouped into the material itself (though keep in mind that ungrouping does not preserve the node group’s input values, so you’ll have to re-assign the corresponding values manually).

</aside>

Damage materials

Damage materials are useful for creating decals with an “old & weathered” look

Damaged - Diffuse: a material for combining some base decal image with weathering/damage/erosion effects. By default, it looks the same as the Basic - Diffuse material, and you'll need to change the Bias and Range controls of the corresponding textures to see the effect. Damage affects the decal's alpha (transparency). Erosion (an image, a procedural noise, or both) affects alpha, roughness and also hue/saturation/value of the base color (the range of Erosion values can be adjusted to control the sharpness/softness of the transitions between the regions of no effect and full effect)

<aside> 🚧 Default values for non-inherit materials, if you would like to go set back parameters without dragging a new material

</aside>

Untitled

PBR Materials

These materials can make use of the most common types of PBR textures, outputting their values to the corresponding BSDF channels

Basic - PBR: a PBR material containing the basic essentials. Uses the Displacement map to control vertex displacement during the rendering (via Blender's corresponding node), in situations where it is supported
Parallax - PBR: instead of true geometric displacement, implements a pseudo-3D "parallax mapping" effect with controllable depth. This might be quite useful to quickly create an illusion of some additional geometry below the surface. Note: if the surface is curved, it is important that it has smooth shading, or the parallax effect will not look correctly. The result may also look wrong (in a different way) if decal's object scale along Z axis is much smaller than along X or Y axes
Extrude - PBR: in combination with the addon's geometry nodes, this works in the opposite direction and creates an illusion of extra geometry protruding from the surface, by stacking many layers of polygons which slice the heightmap like a volume

<aside> 🚧 When importing decals from images on your hard drive, pay attention to the Multi Tex setting when using PBR materials. If it’s enabled, only images with file names containing the recognized PBR channel names will be considered for import (and multiple images which share the same prefix and only differ in PBR channel names will be imported as a single decal with multiple texture maps). If Multi Tex is disabled, you will be able to create decals with PBR materials from any images (a decal per image), but those images will be assigned to the image node corresponding to diffuse color.

</aside>

`XDecal.UVW` node group

Almost all of these materials (except for the Parallax PBR) use the XDecal.UVW node group as the source of texture coordinates for decal images. This node group calculates the transformed planar/toroidal coordinates (or falls back to UV map coordinates), and implements additional UV-manipulation effects which are displayed in the Decal Popup under the [UV Adjustment] label

[UV Adjustment] label

UV Tweak: allows you to adjust the offset and scale of UV coordinates
UV Slice: implements 9-slicing, specified as the relative size of slices from each side of the UV rectangle
UV Atlas: crops a specified UV rectangle out of the whole image, making it look like that rectangle was the whole texture. For example, this can be useful in situations when an image contains multiple textures packed into a single atlas.

Default material library

Basic materials

Chroma key materials

Stencil materials

Damage materials

PBR Materials

XDecal.UVW node group

[UV Adjustment] label

`XDecal.UVW` node group