Understanding the Inspector

Genesis ships with a custom Unity inspector that organizes 100+ properties into eight foldouts. Once you know the layout, you can find any feature in two clicks. This page is a guided tour — read it once and the rest of the docs map directly onto the panels you already know.

Screenshot

The full Genesis material inspector with all eight foldouts (Surface, Lighting, Maps, Effects, Animation, Advanced, Optimization, Debug) labelled down the side.

basics/understanding-the-inspector/full-inspector.png

The foldout workflow

Foldouts are remembered per-material across Unity sessions. Right-click any foldout header for Collapse All and Expand All. The gear icon on each header resets, copies, or pastes that section’s values without touching the rest of the material.

The panels

Surface

The top of every Genesis material. Controls Rendering Mode (Lit / Unlit / Toon), surface type (opaque / transparent), blend mode, cull mode, render queue.

Lighting

Diffuse model selector (Lambert / Oren-Nayar / Minnaert / Gooch), cel shading sub-panel, specular highlights, rim lighting, MatCap, translucency.

Maps

Texture assignments — albedo, normal, mask (smoothness/AO/metallic packed), detail, layer, height gradient, vertex color blending.

Effects

Stylized FX — outline, sketch / hatching / drawn overlays, dissolve, hologram, hit flash, intersection glow, fade-by-distance, dither, wireframe, see-through.

Animation

Vertex animation type dropdown (17+ presets), UV animation (scroll / wave / distortion), hand-drawn jitter, stutter.

Advanced

Triplanar, stochastic sampling, UV channel selectors, color adjustments (HSV, hue shift, greyscale, posterize), depth coloring.

Optimization

Per-material keyword strip controls, batching hints, GPU instancing toggle, LOD bias.

Debug

Diagnostic visualizations — normals, NdotL, UV, world position, overdraw. Editor-only.

Section tools

Every foldout header has a small gear icon. Click it for:

Reset Section — restore defaults for that foldout only.
Copy Section — clipboard the values.
Paste Section — apply clipboard values to another material.

Copy / Paste Section is the fastest way to clone a look across a family of materials without copying every slot manually.

Pasting a section between Lit and Unlit materials silently drops properties that the destination mode does not support. Check the result before you commit.