Material vocabulary

What a model is made of.

Elements are the shapes a model can carry. These are the substances those shapes — and every wall, floor and roof — are finished in. One card is one substance, because that is the word a person reaches for: wood, tile, weave, brushed metal.

Colour is not part of the identity. A material names the substance it is made of and how light it is, and one module derives the colour for both outputs from the pair. So a substance is not one colour; it is a ladder of seven, and every card below opens onto a control that walks it.

{"t":"materialdef","id":"my-oak","of":"timber","value":72}

This used to be a category naming a construction role, which is not a substance: one role covered brushed steel, oiled oak and woven upholstery, so the renderer carried two tables of exceptions and 26 of 37 built-ins overrode the answer their category gave. Authors reached for whichever role gave the colour they wanted — which is how a black interior finish came to be filed as a roof.

287 registered materials occupy these 35 substances, and the crowding is the point of grouping them: four separate names land on oak at value 72 and render identically. Open a substance to see which rungs are taken and by what.