Surface Presets

Surface Presets is the library the Scratch Pad saves into. Each entry is one .vsp file holding a complete surface — every channel that was on the pad when you saved it — plus a cached thumbnail. Apply one and the material wears the whole set at once.

Browsing the library

Surfaces are shown as a grid of thumbnails, six to a row, with a count underneath telling you how many are in the current folder. Hover a thumbnail for a larger preview. A folder selector at the top switches between subfolders of assets/surface; + creates a new one and Refresh re-reads the folder from disk, which is what you want after adding or renaming a file outside Vertexix.

An empty library says so rather than showing you nothing: No surfaces saved yet. Build one on the Scratch Pad. The + New tile at the end of the grid opens the Scratch Pad to start one.

Managing a surface

Right-click a thumbnail:

• Move Surface — moves it to another folder. The .vsp and its cached icon both move.
• Edit Surface — loads it back onto the Scratch Pad to change it.
• Rename Preset — renames the .vsp in assets/surface and its icon in the cache together.
• Delete Surface — removes the .vsp and its cached icon.

Applying a surface

Selecting a surface applies it to the material that is currently active in the Layers panel. A surface usually carries more channels than a material has layers for — a plain material may only have a Base Color, while the surface also brings normal, roughness, height and occlusion.

When that happens Vertexix tells you which layers are missing before it does anything, and offers to create them for you. Creating a set of layers means creating a set of images, so a progress bar shows how many there are, how many are done, and which one is being made. When it finishes, the material has somewhere for every channel of the surface to land, and the surface is applied.