Material Editor essentials

Every character, clothing item, and prop in Studio has a Material Editor entry, and once you know where to find it, the everyday edits (color, shine, shader, transparency, textures) all follow the same pattern. This guide covers the moves you’ll use constantly.

1. Open Material Editor on the right object

Material Editor lives on the Workspace panel in Studio, there’s no dedicated hotkey for it. Select the object first:

To edit a character’s skin or body shaders, select the character itself in the workspace tree, not a bone, folder, or a sub-part of it.
To edit clothing, hair, or an accessory, select that item’s base object.

The Material Editor button stays inactive until a real object is selected. Clicking a folder, a bone, or an armature node won’t activate it. Once it opens, a dropdown at the top switches between the object’s parts (Top, Bottom, Inner Top, and so on for clothing).

In the character maker there’s no separate Material Editor window. Body and face materials live under the Body tab’s Overall subtab, and each clothing or hair item exposes its own material section within its own tab.

Selecting the wrong sub-part is the single most common Material Editor problem. Outfits and bodies are often built from several near-identical layers (an inner top under an outer top, a base body under an alpha mask). If an edit seems to do nothing, you very likely edited a different part than the one you're looking at, check the dropdown at the top of the window before assuming something is broken.

2. Recolor anything

Select the material you want to change, then use the Color 1 swatch to pick a new color. Materials that support more elaborate recoloring also expose a Color 2 swatch, and sometimes more, use those for secondary tones like trim, shadow, or highlight color. If a shader doesn’t show a color option at all, that swatch simply isn’t wired up for it, in that case there’s nothing to adjust in Material Editor for color on that part.

3. Reduce unwanted shine

Glossiness sits in the Body Overall section for the body, and per-item for clothing. Lower it there if a skin or clothing texture looks shinier than you want.

Watch for ExGloss on the same material. If the item’s creator set an ExGloss value, it overrides the base Glossiness/Shine setting, so turning Glossiness down alone won’t fully remove the shine, ExGloss needs to come down too. The same slider is used deliberately to fake a wet-skin look (small values, roughly 0.01 to 1, control the intensity), so if something looks glossier than expected after you’ve already lowered Glossiness, check ExGloss next.

4. Swap a shader

Select the material, then use the Shader dropdown to switch it to a different one. This is the move behind most shader-related fixes: reassigning a broken shader (shows as solid purple or magenta) to a working one, or moving a material between shader families for a different look entirely. Shader choice affects which sliders and slots (like alpha or gloss) actually show up, so a slider “missing” from a material is often just a shader that doesn’t expose it. For the full picture of what each shader family does, see How to change a shader.

5. Control transparency and opacity

Not every shader supports transparency. Switch the material to an alpha-capable shader first (look for “alpha” in the shader’s name), then use the Alpha slider to dial in opacity. Some materials expose a Translucency slider instead, if Alpha has no visible effect, try that.

Making clothing see-through can break the body underneath it. If the skin under a newly transparent item turns black, disappears, or looks torn, the clothing is masking it, not the other way round. Fix it on the body's own material: set its "degree of tear" slider to -1, or load a blank white image into its Alpha Mask slot to cancel the clothing's mask.

6. Export or replace a texture

Every material has MainTex Export and Import options. Export saves the exact texture the game is currently using as a PNG, edit it in any image editor and bring it back with Import. This is the high-level, direct way to touch a texture, useful for one-off fixes like painting out a clipping seam or reshaping a printed design.

For anything you want layered on top of the base texture instead of replacing it outright, such as tattoos or patterns, use the overlay system rather than overwriting MainTex directly. Overwriting MainTex with what should have been an overlay is a common source of black or broken-looking results. See Overlays, tattoos, and textures for that full workflow.

Want to	Do this
Recolor a material	Color 1 swatch (Color 2 if present)
Kill excess shine	Lower Glossiness, then check ExGloss
Fix a broken/purple material	Shader dropdown, pick a working shader
Make something see-through	Alpha-capable shader, then the Alpha slider
One-off texture edit	MainTex Export, edit externally, Import
Layered tattoo or pattern	Overlay, not MainTex

Common mistakes

Two gotchas account for most “my edit didn’t do anything” cases:

You edited a different sub-part than the one you were looking at. Reselect the object, check the part dropdown, and confirm you’re on the right slot before changing anything else.
An overlay is drawing over your MainTex edit. If you changed MainTex directly but an overlay is also applied to that slot, the overlay renders on top and hides your change. Remove or update the overlay, or make the edit through the overlay system instead.

If a purple or magenta material won’t take a shader change, or skin specifically renders black, grey, or the wrong tone, that’s usually a missing texture or a shader mismatch rather than a Material Editor mistake, see Fix pink or invisible textures and Fix skin tone shader problems.

Once you’re comfortable with these basics, the shader and overlay guides above cover the deeper workflows Material Editor feeds into.