This page will serve as a hub for the symbols and properties users can assign to their materials. We will be learning how the name of our material in our 3D editing software is used to find a valid shader tag, how various special properties can be assigned to a surface through a specific symbol, and set how the lightmapper will use our surface during rasterization. Some examples are adding the ^ symbol to the end of a material name (like vines^) so it becomes a climbable ladder, or the special name +sky which causes the marked surface to render our assigned sky.

This naming convention applies to both Blender and 3ds Max usage.

The convention used differs by game so select the link relevant for your current work.

• Halo 1 materials
• Halo 2 materials
• Halo 3 materials

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following individuals for their research or contributions to this topic:

• Halo PC End User Editing Kit Development Team (Writing the original HEK tutorial which documents many of these conventions)