Materials

Materials in Hew are simple and per-document: a palette of flat colors and image textures that you paint onto faces or assign to whole objects.

The Materials panel

Expand Materials in the right-hand tray (or Window ▸ Materials, ⇧⌘C / Ctrl+Shift+C).

The panel contains:

• Default (unpainted) is the built-in neutral gray. Select it to “paint with nothing,” i.e. to reset faces back to unpainted.
• Your material swatches: click one to make it the current material and pick up the Paint tool in one move — the very next click paints with it (see Painting below). Texture materials show a thumbnail.
• Opacity: drag the slider to make the selected swatch translucent — glass, screens, scrims, anything meant to be seen through. Works the same for colors and textures.
• Add color: pick a color with the color picker, optionally name it, and add it to the palette.
• Add texture: choose a PNG or JPEG image and give it a real-world size (width × height in meters). The image tiles across faces at that physical scale.

Opacity

Every material has an opacity, from fully opaque (100%) down to fully transparent (0%) — 255 shades either way. Select the swatch you want to change, then drag the Opacity slider underneath the swatch list. The percentage next to it tracks where you are.

The change applies to every face and object currently painted with that material, updates the viewport immediately, and is undoable like any other edit.

Painting

Click the swatch you want — that makes it the current material and switches you to the Paint tool automatically (you can also pick Paint yourself with B). Then:

• Click a face to paint just that face.
• ⌘/Ctrl-click to set the whole object’s base material in one go.

The hovered face highlights so you can see what you’re about to paint. To un-paint, select the Default swatch and paint again.

Face paint vs. object base material

Every object has an optional base material — the color its faces show when they haven’t been painted individually. Individually painted faces override the base. The base is why painted models stay painted as you keep working: when an operation creates new faces (pulling a boss out of a painted box, slicing, booleans), the new faces inherit the object’s base material instead of reverting to gray.

Set the base material with ⌘/Ctrl-click in the Paint tool.

Materials survive modeling

Painted faces keep their materials through splitting, push/pull, slicing, and boolean operations — material assignments follow the surviving geometry. Painting is undoable like any other edit.

Materials and export

glTF/GLB export carries your colors and embedded textures with the model. Use it when the receiving app should see materials. STL has no concept of color; it exports bare geometry. See Import and export.