OpenGL uses materials to refer to the properties of an object that determine how it interacts with light. In practice, when rendering you specify what (shape) to render and how to render. The shape is specified using the Mesh (or more commonly MeshPart), which defines the vertex attributes for the shader. The material is most commonly used to specify the uniform values for the shader.

Uniforms can be grouped into modelspecific (for example, the texture applied or whether or not to use blending) and environmental uniforms (for example, the lights being applied or an environment cubemap). Likewise, the 3D API allows you to specify a material and environment.