The universe
Lamp
Height
Incidence
Lobe
Irradiance
Specimen M.01
M.01ReflectsFS-04
Metal.
Brushed aluminium, steel, chrome, concrete.
Base#A6A6A6
Roughness0.25
Metalness1.00
Emission
Roughness is the width of the reflection.
The same object. Three answers.

Flyshare Material // Specimen bench

There is one light in this room and it is your cursor. A material is not a colour — it is what it does with that light.

Scroll for the data sheet

FS-04 // Material 000
Measuring the specimen

Flyshare Material // Data sheet

Three materials.

The bench is where you see material. This is where it gets specified. Every value on this sheet is the value the shading above is running on — change one here and the specimen changes with it.

//Specimens

A material is the width of its reflection.

Industrial design meets the dark empire. Metal, light, high gloss — and nothing else. They come from a photograph or a render, never from a gradient. What separates them is not colour: it is how wide the reflected lobe opens, and the lobe opens by roughness × 90°. M.01 is a ±22° fan. M.03 collapses to a ±4° needle. M.02 has no lobe at all, because it has no incident ray — it emits. The three diagrams below are polar plots of the same function the bench is shading with, drawn at true angle.

M.01Reflects
Metal.
Brushed aluminium, steel, chrome, concrete.
N ±22° IN
Base colour#A6A6A6
Roughness0.25
Metalness1.00
Lobe±22.5°
F0 · head-on0.92

Anisotropic. The grain runs one way, so the highlight is a streak, not a spot.

M.02Emits
Light.
LED, halogen, the saber. Emitted, never tinted.
N OUT NO IN
Base colour#E11C16
Roughness0.30
Metalness0.00
Emission#FF3B30 @ 1.9
F0 · head-on

Never a black base under an emitter. And it still needs its chamfer, or it is a silhouette.

M.03Reflects
High gloss.
Lacquer. Trooper white — Vader black is one base swap.
N ±4.5° IN
Base colour#FFFFFF
Roughness0.05
Metalness0.00
Lobe±4.5°
F0 · head-on0.04

One sweep makes lacquer. Two make a gradient.

//Construction

Chamfer, never fillet.

A panel gap on a car body is a decision, not a softening. A rounded edge reads as moulded plastic, and it breaks the logo rule outright — the arrow tip is never rounded, in 2D or in 3D. The specimen on the bench carries a flat 45° chamfer, and that is why the light along its edge is a band with two hard boundaries. A fillet turns the same edge into a smear, which is the whole difference between a machined part and a moulded one.

Fig. 01 — Chamfer
C 45° CONSTANT SLOPE ONE NORMAL ACROSS THE FACE HIGHLIGHT: A BAND WITH EDGES
Fig. 02 — Fillet · rejected
R CONTINUOUS TANGENT EVERY NORMAL DIFFERENT HIGHLIGHT: A SMEAR. NOT USED.

//Light

Falloff is never linear.

One source, and everything obeys it. Move the lamp away from the specimen and the fall is not a slope, it is a curve — that single detail is what separates real light from a CSS glow. It is also why a source and a lit surface can never be styled the same way, and why section A–A on the bench inverts the moment M.02 is selected: there is nothing coming in. The curve below is the exact function the bench is running, plotted against the straight line most interfaces use instead. Half power at one reference distance, and it never reaches zero.

Fig. 03 — Irradiance over distance
HALF POWER AT 1.0 D0 0 4 D0 LINEAR — NOT USED E = 1 / (1 + (D/D0) x (D/D0))