The Shelf

The Shelf is your asset library. It holds reusable content you drag into the scene — brush alphas, baked maps, imported images, and smart materials — organised into tabs.

Screenshot: the Shelf panel with its tabs

Tabs

Tab	Contents	Drag onto
Alphas	Brush footprint shapes (procedural + imported). See Stamps & alphas.	Click a tile to set the brush stamp.
Fill Layers	Prebuilt fill-layer templates.	The Layers panel, to add the fill layer.
Smart Materials	Saved layer stacks you can re-apply. See Smart materials.	The model, to apply.
Images	Images you've imported as sources. See Importing textures.	A mesh-map slot in Texture Set Settings.
Bakes	The active set's baked mesh maps, with a status badge (Baked / Not Baked / Pending).	A Fill layer's channel slot, or a mask Bake Sample row.

Smart materials

A smart material is a whole layer stack — fills, masks, generators and all — saved as a reusable asset. Build a great metal or wood once, then drop it onto any model.

Capture

Group the layers you want to save into a folder, then right-click it in the Layers panel and choose Save as Smart Material…. The captured asset includes the whole folder subtree — fills, paint layers, masks, generators, blend modes and opacities — plus the painted pixels of any paint layers and any imported images those layers reference. It appears in the Shelf's Smart Materials tab.

Capture is only offered on a folder — a one-layer material is rarely useful, so group first.

Screenshot: capturing a smart material

Apply

Drag a smart material from the Shelf onto the model to add its layers above the active set. (You can also right-click a layer ▸ Apply Smart Material… and pick a file.) Channels are remapped to the target set, so a material made for one mesh works on another. Applying is undoable.

GIF: applying a smart material

Manage

Right-click a tile to rename or delete a smart material, or to open its folder. Materials are stored as portable .cgmat files in the CGP library folder next to the app (under Smart Materials/) — so they carry between projects and machines. Point the library somewhere else, or add extra read-only library folders, in Preferences ▸ Library.

Importing textures

Bring an external image into the project and use it as a source — anywhere a texture source is accepted: a fill layer, a fill effect inside a paint layer, or a mask.

Importing an image

In the Shelf's Images tab, click Import image… (multi-select is fine), or drag image files straight onto the tab. Imported images live in the project. Supported formats: .png, .jpg/.jpeg, .bmp, .tga, .tif/.tiff, .webp.

Screenshot: Shelf ▸ Images

Using it as a source

Fill layer — set a channel's source to the image.
Mask — drive a mask from the image (via a Texture Sample generator).

Each source has its own UV transform — tiling, offset, rotation, plus wrap and filtering — so you can place and repeat the image independently.

GIF: dropping an image into a fill layer channel