To draw something in Unity, you must provide information that describes its shape, and information that describes the appearance of its surface. You use meshes to describe shapes, and materials to describe the appearance of surfaces.

Materials and shaders are closely linked; you always use materials with shaders.

A material contains a reference to a Shader object. If that Shader object defines material properties, then the material can also contain data such as colors or references to textures.

The Material class represents a material in C# code. For information, see Using Materials with C# scripts.

A material asset is a file with the extension. It represents a material in your Unity project. For information on viewing and editing a material asset using the Inspector window, see Material Inspector reference.

Unity supports functionality for creating variants of Materials. To learn more about this functionality, see Material Variants.