---
title: Material Panel
order: 1
---

The Chisel Material panel lives in *Material Properties* (red sphere icon) when the active object is a Chisel SDF and the render engine is set to Chisel.

![Default matcap mode — no per-object color](../assets/matcap-preview.webp)

## Material slot

The slot picker at the top is Blender's standard *active material* control. Click **New** to give the object a fresh Chisel material — that creates a material with a default node tree (a Matcap Shader feeding the Material Output) and assigns it to the slot.

Existing materials carry forward; the panel detects whether the active material has Chisel data and shows the right controls.

## Color *(no node tree)*

When the material has **no node tree** yet (a fresh slot, or an imported non-Chisel material that you've just promoted), the panel shows a single control:

- **Color** — RGB value (default `0.8, 0.8, 0.8`). Multiplied into the matcap so each object can carry its own tint without disturbing scene-wide shading.

For most modeling work this is all you need. Drag the swatch, pick a color, move on.

If you later want richer behavior (mix shaders, masks, blended colors across booleans), click **Create Node Tree** and the panel switches to the editor hint described below.

## Editing the node tree

Once a node tree exists, the panel collapses to a hint:

> Edit in Node Editor (Chisel Material)

Open a *Node Editor* area, switch its tree type to **Chisel Material** in the header, and the graph appears. See [Node Editor](node-editor.md) for the available nodes and how they connect.

## Live render preview

Material edits update live in the viewport while the Chisel engine is active — there's no separate preview render. Use viewport shading at *Material Preview* level to see the matcap shading; *Solid* mode falls back to the proxy mesh and won't show your color choices accurately.

![Same scene with per-object colors applied](../assets/material-render.webp)

## See also

- [Node Editor](node-editor.md) — the Chisel Shader Editor reference
- [Render Engine: Matcap](../render-engine/matcap.md) — scene matcap that the per-object color multiplies into
- [Modifiers: Boolean](../modifiers/boolean.md) — *Material Blend* width across boolean seams