guitar-gear-materials

Guitar Gear Materials

Use this skill to create, tune, organize, and apply materials for guitar pedals, amplifiers, cabinets, and associated hardware.

Read only the references needed for the task:

• Material recipes: basic response ranges for coatings, metal, plastic, rubber, lenses and other common materials.
• Amplifier surfaces: vinyl grain, cloth, vintage hardware, cups, sockets and piping when those surfaces are involved.
• Material diagnostics: unexpected black levels, saturated coatings, isolated material candidates, sparkle or physical-scale mismatches. The visual patch test is primary; anisotropic math is an advanced optional fallback.
• Graphics and decals: source logos/arrows, registration, flush printing, molded relief and glyph verification.

Runtime glTF materials

Use when exporting guitar gear to Three.js/WebGL. Read runtime PBR for procedural baking, supported material inputs, panel graphics, grille sampling, LED isolation and measured texture budgets. Preserve master shaders and judge the translated material at actual plugin resolution and intended maximum zoom.

Refinement decision rules

Lock accepted systems and name the allowed changes before editing. For ambiguous visible defects, compare the baseline with restrained candidates under fixed conditions; keep the smallest change that improves reference match at delivery size. Stop when requested work is complete, delivery-preventing or visibly/dimensionally wrong issues are resolved, and protected systems pass regression checks; do not discard verified repairs or mark unfinished requirements passed to stop.

Use the refinement contract for source/target versions, evidence and stop conditions. The shared candidate and diagnosis procedure owns detailed comparison rules. If using this skill alone, record facts, accepted values, uncertain estimates, allowed changes and protected properties in the existing project brief.

When to use

Use for material creation, PBR texture setup, procedural surface variation, UV/image textures, decals, printed labels, LEDs/lenses, and reusable material libraries.

Do not use this as the primary modeling or lighting workflow. Pair with $guitar-gear-modeling and $guitar-product-render.

Core principles

1. Material identity comes from reflection first. Roughness, metallic response, normals, and lighting matter more than decorative noise.
2. Keep texture scale physically believable. A 1 mm powder-coat texture should not appear as 20 mm bumps.
3. Use subtle variation. Real product surfaces are imperfect, but product renders should not look dirty unless requested.
4. Separate geometry from graphics intentionally. Printed ink, engraved marks, embossed logos, and physical badges should not all be solved the same way.
5. Prefer reusable node groups/materials. Guitar gear repeats the same families of metal, plastic, rubber, vinyl, fabric, and wood.

MCP discipline

• Inspect existing materials and node trees before replacing them.
• Discover available Blender MCP node/material operations instead of assuming a particular API.
• Make one material family at a time and inspect a rendered/material-preview result before proliferating it.
• Avoid opaque large Python scripts when direct node operations are available.
• Do not delete existing custom materials unless the user asked for replacement or they are clearly throwaway placeholders.

Material procedure

1. Identify the physical material. Ask what the object is made of, not merely what color it is.
2. Set base response. Establish Base Color, Metallic, Roughness, IOR/transmission where relevant.
3. Add micro-surface detail. Use restrained bump/normal/roughness variation at real-world scale.
4. Add manufacturing cues. Brushing direction, powder-coat orange peel, molded plastic texture, vinyl grain, cloth weave, or wood grain only where physically appropriate.
5. Handle edge realism through geometry. Do not try to simulate missing bevels with materials.
6. Add graphics. Choose UV/image, decal, geometry, or text based on permanence, relief, and viewing distance.
7. Inspect under product lighting. A material is not approved from a flat shader ball alone; inspect it on the actual product under representative reflections.
8. Save reusable materials. Use stable semantic names and avoid duplicate .001 variants when the material is genuinely shared.

Refinement gates

• Preserve accepted base materials, geometry and presentation; reuse existing variation layers before adding new ones. Isolate treatments that should not affect every shared metal/plastic part.
• Audit physical grain density on equal-world-size surface patches. Identical node values and unit object scales are insufficient for anisotropic 3D mapping. Keep density distinct from wrap orientation.
• Diagnose a stripe or seam through geometry, normals, coordinates and temporary lighting before altering the shader. A real beveled construction joint may remain dark.
• Use manufacturing and handling cues appropriate to the requested age. Well-maintained vintage gear need not have grunge, bright edge wear, brown cloth or damaged trim.
• Judge each meaningful change at native hero size and relevant detail distance. Full-resolution weave and small text can fail despite a clean preview.

Naming convention

Prefer names such as:

GG_MAT_PowderCoat_Black_Satin
GG_MAT_Aluminum_Brushed
GG_MAT_Chrome
GG_MAT_ABS_Black
GG_MAT_Rubber_Black
GG_MAT_Tolex_Black
GG_MAT_GrilleCloth_SaltPepper
GG_MAT_LED_Green
GG_MAT_Ink_White

Preserve an existing coherent project convention rather than renaming everything.

Texture and node rules

• Use explicit Mapping/Texture Coordinate control for scale-sensitive procedurals.
• Avoid using the same procedural noise scale for bump, roughness, and color without purpose.
• Route normal maps through a Normal Map node and set image color space correctly when working manually.
• Treat roughness/metallic/normal/displacement maps as non-color data.
• Keep displacement subtle and use it only when the render method and mesh density support it.
• Prefer bump for microtexture and geometry for silhouette-changing detail.
• Do not overuse subsurface scattering on opaque plastics.

Graphics rules

• For a full pedal face graphic, a single UV-mapped image can be simpler and more robust than many tiny decals.
• Use decals for modular labels, serial plates, warning stickers, badges, and reusable markings.
• Use geometry for engraved, embossed, stamped, or raised details that produce real parallax/shadows in close-ups.
• Preserve sharp text. Do not feed label masks through noisy displacement chains.
• Keep logos and type aligned to the real panel axes unless the reference clearly differs.

Efficiency plan

• Create a small core library first: powder coat, aluminum, chrome/nickel, ABS, rubber, tolex, grille cloth, LED lens, and printed ink.
• Reuse materials and vary parameters rather than cloning nearly identical node trees.
• Test materials on representative parts: enclosure, knob, washer, foot, cabinet, grille.
• Stop adding procedural detail once it is below the target render's visible scale.

Common failure modes

• Metal looks gray plastic: metallic is wrong or the lighting lacks useful reflections.
• Chrome looks black: there is nothing bright for it to reflect; fix the environment/lighting before increasing Base Color.
• Powder coat looks like stucco: bump amplitude or texture scale is far too large.
• Plastic looks like candy: roughness is too low and edges may be over-rounded.
• Tolex looks painted on: grain scale is wrong or cabinet seams/edge construction are missing.
• Grille cloth causes moire: weave geometry/texture is too fine for the render sampling; simplify or adjust representation.
• Decals look pasted on: roughness/specular response does not match the printing process or the decal sits visibly above the surface.

Verification checklist

• Material names are reusable and understandable.
• Metals respond like metals under actual scene lighting.
• Texture scale is plausible relative to real dimensions.
• Surface bump is restrained at product-render distance.
• Graphics are sharp, aligned, and free of obvious haloing.
• Transparent materials/lenses render cleanly.
• No accidental duplicate materials are proliferating.
• The actual product has been preview-rendered under representative lighting.