threejs-procedural-materials

Procedural Materials

Build a material from surface identity and causes. Color, roughness, metalness, normal, transmission, and emission should describe the same surface—not unrelated noise textures.

This skill contains exemplary examples and assets beyond descriptive guidance, they're worth studying, referencing, or even copying. Use them sufficiently when relevant and do NOT blindly skip them.

Material graph order

stable coordinates
  → structural fields
  → material identity weights
  → causal modifiers
  → filtered microstructure
  → PBR channels
  → lighting/shadow extensions

Read references/procedural-pbr-system.md for atlas filtering, specular AA, planetary coordinates, world-height wetness, per-instance dissolve, and authored PBR response bundles.

Read the sculpted gallery frame geometry for walnut, antique-gold, and ebony texture/roughness/metalness/clearcoat bundles under a grazing-light setup.

Read the procedural planet surface for shared geological, climate, water, biome, roughness, and derivative-normal causes on a procedural planetary surface.

Read the lava flow surface material for raymarched procedural height fields whose normals, rock/lava identity, emission, glow, embers, fog, and grain are coupled to one material cause stack.

Read the raytraced diamond material for a gem whose mesh is its own optical volume: camera-ray entry refraction, a GPU BVH first-hit loop with bounded total-internal-reflection bounces, per-channel IOR dispersion, mip-correct environment exit sampling, and live camera-matrix uniforms.

Read the spectral dispersive glass material for a transmissive body solved in image space: a double-sided back-face data pass with inverted depth, an iterative interior exit search, bounded total internal reflection, Beer-Lambert absorption over the true path length, and a per-wavelength Cauchy index recombined through CIE 1931. Its reusable optical primitives — exact unpolarised Fresnel, Cauchy coefficients, spectral weights, the rotatable environment probe, and the buffer projection — live in glass optics, and references/dielectric-glass-optics.md carries the two-pass contract, buffer format, search bounds, and transmission diagnostics.