Summary

Three.js gives you a lot of materials you can use to skin your geometries. The materials range from the very simple (THREE.MeshBasicMaterial) to the complex (THREE.ShaderMaterial), where you can provide your own vertexShader and fragmentShader programs. Materials share a lot of basic properties. If you know how to use a single material, you'll probably also know how to use the other materials. Note that not all materials respond to the lights in your scene. If you want a material that takes lighting into effect, you can usually just use the THREE.MeshStandardMaterial. If you need more control, you can also look at THREE.MeshPhysicalMaterial,  THREE.MeshPhongMaterial, or THREE.MeshLamberMaterial. Determining the effect of certain material properties just from code is very hard. Often, a good idea is to use a dat.GUI approach to experiment with these...