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Wireframe & Material

Intermediate

Three rendering toggles above the camera mode buttons in the viewport let you change how your build is displayed without modifying anything you've actually built. They're purely visual aids for inspection and planning work.

Wireframe

Wireframe overlays a line along every block edge on top of the normal textured render — the same effect as pressing W on the keyboard. Every block type gets the wireframe treatment, including plain cube blocks.

Use Wireframe when you want to:

Wireframe and material textures are shown at the same time — you can still see the full coloured, textured render underneath the wireframe lines.

Flat Material

Flat Material temporarily replaces every block's texture with a uniform flat grey. The geometry and shading are preserved — you still see the 3D shape of your build with lighting and shadows — but all material colour, pattern, and texture detail is stripped away.

This is useful when material detail is making it hard to read the overall shape. A complex facade with many different materials can be visually noisy; switching to Flat Material reduces it to a clean grey silhouette, making the geometry itself much easier to evaluate.

Tip: Taking a screenshot in Flat Material mode gives you a clean "massing model" style image — useful for checking proportions or sharing a structural preview without giving away your material choices.

Hide Material

Hide Material goes further than Flat Material: it hides all material rendering entirely, leaving only wireframe outlines visible. The result is a pure edge diagram of your build — every block is represented by its outline box with no fill at all.

This is the most extreme inspection mode. Use it when you want to:

Combining the Toggles

All three toggles are independent — you can enable any combination simultaneously:

CombinationResult
Wireframe onlyNormal textured render + edge lines on every block.
Flat Material onlyGrey silhouette with shading, no textures.
Hide Material onlyWireframe-only view, all fill hidden.
Wireframe + Flat MaterialGrey silhouette with explicit edge lines — maximally readable geometry.
Wireframe + Hide MaterialIdentical to Hide Material alone (wireframe is already all that shows).
Flat Material + Hide MaterialHide Material takes precedence — you get the wireframe-only view.

The most practically useful combination is Wireframe + Flat Material: the flat grey eliminates texture distraction while the wireframe lines make block boundaries perfectly explicit.

None of these toggles modify your build. Turning them off restores the normal view exactly as it was — all materials, colours, and textures are preserved. They're purely cosmetic while they're active.

Using These Toggles for Screenshots

Because the toggles change how the build is rendered without modifying anything, they're useful for producing different styles of screenshot from the same build:

Use the PNG button in the top bar to capture any of these views. The screenshot captures exactly what the viewport shows, including which toggles are currently active.

Inspecting Specific Structures

A few practical use cases where these toggles are especially helpful:

Keyboard Shortcut

Wireframe has a dedicated keyboard shortcut — W — which toggles it on and off without reaching for the viewport overlay button. Flat Material and Hide Material don't have shortcuts, but can be toggled quickly by clicking their buttons in the viewport cluster above the camera mode buttons.

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