Wireframe & Material
IntermediateThree 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:
- Spot gaps or unintentional holes in a wall or floor that aren't obvious in the normal textured view.
- See exactly where block boundaries fall in a dense structure — for example, to confirm that roofing panels are meeting at the right cell.
- Count blocks in a given area where the textures make individual block boundaries hard to distinguish.
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.
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:
- Check layer structure from a top-down view without any fill obscuring lower layers.
- Count blocks or measure dimensions in a complex build where the normal view is too visually dense.
- Inspect internal structure in a building where the exterior walls would normally block the view.
Combining the Toggles
All three toggles are independent — you can enable any combination simultaneously:
| Combination | Result |
|---|---|
| Wireframe only | Normal textured render + edge lines on every block. |
| Flat Material only | Grey silhouette with shading, no textures. |
| Hide Material only | Wireframe-only view, all fill hidden. |
| Wireframe + Flat Material | Grey silhouette with explicit edge lines — maximally readable geometry. |
| Wireframe + Hide Material | Identical to Hide Material alone (wireframe is already all that shows). |
| Flat Material + Hide Material | Hide 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.
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:
- Normal (all toggles off) — the standard textured, coloured render. Best for showing off a finished build.
- Flat Material — a grey silhouette. Good for "massing model" previews that emphasise form over finish.
- Wireframe — textured render with block edges shown. Good for technical reference images where block boundaries matter.
- Hide Material — a pure line diagram. Good for overhead structural maps or planning references.
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:
- Checking a hollow structure — with Hide Material on and the camera in Top or Front preset, you can see directly through the outer shell to inspect the interior layout without orbiting around to find a gap to look through.
- Aligning roofing — Wireframe makes the cell boundaries explicit, which is helpful when placing Sloped, Hipped, and Valley roof pieces that need to meet precisely at shared edges.
- Identifying rogue blocks — if the block counter shows a higher total than you expected, switching to Wireframe and orbiting slowly around the build can reveal stray blocks that are hidden behind other geometry in the normal textured view.
- Comparing material choices — Flat Material lets you evaluate proportions and shape decisions independently of material colour, so you're not influenced by a material's aesthetic while still deciding on structure.
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.