| name | threejs-procedural-materials |
| description | Author production procedural materials in Three.js. Use for hybrid texture-backed PBR soil and moss with procedural displacement and masks, upward-facing model moss accumulation, atlas filtering, specular AA, planet-space fields, terrain wetness, lava and emissive surfaces, per-instance dissolve, authored PBR identities, derivative normals, and custom direct-light shadow modulation. |
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.
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
analytic wave optics
for coupled reflection, refraction, absorption, filtered microstructure,
resolved crest response, and their diagnostic channels.
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.
Required controls
- real or perceptual texture scale;
- material identity weights;
- roughness range and micro-normal strength;
- the causal fields required by the selected material pattern;
- distance/derivative filtering;
- specular antialiasing;
- channel and mask debug modes.
- emissive-material debug modes when the material owns glow or volumetric
accumulation.
Read references/hybrid-soil-moss-surface.md
and the
hybrid soil and moss implementation
for texture-backed soil and moss albedo, AO, roughness, and normal microdetail
combined with procedural mound displacement, moisture, moss coverage/height,
and warped cellular cracks. Do not describe its surface identity as fully
procedurally synthesized. When moss must also settle onto a model, read the
model moss implementation
for model-locked coverage, upward-face accumulation, displaced thickness, and
shared moss PBR identity.
Failure conditions
- every PBR channel samples independent noise;
- roughness is a scalar afterthought;
- high-frequency normals survive below one pixel;
- triplanar projection has visible orientation or scale seams;
- atlas padding is ignored under mipmapping;
- custom lighting removes energy conservation without an explicit stylized goal;
- post-processing is used to hide unstable highlights.
Routing boundary
Use $threejs-procedural-fields when the main problem is designing shared
scalar/vector causes. Use $threejs-procedural-planets for a complete
orbit-to-close-approach body, not merely its material. Use
$threejs-parallax-occlusion-mapping when a height field must own ray-marched
intersection, silhouette coverage, or relief-aware shadows.
