In the Rhino 5 era, material management was file-centric. Materials were saved as .vrmat files or embedded within the .3dm file. Unlike modern ecosystems (such as VRscans or Chaos Cosmos available today), users in Rhino 5 largely relied on manual texture mapping and third-party libraries (e.g., Viz-People, Arroway textures) to build their shaders.

Materials are typically saved as .vrmat files. While older .vismat files from V-Ray 1.49 are no longer supported for saving, they can often be imported into newer V-Ray versions for compatibility.