Materials
You can add materials to objects in your drawings to provide a realistic effect. A material’s settings create its physical properties. The Materials tool palette in the Tool Palettes window provides a large number of materials already created for you. You use these material tools to apply materials to objects in a scene. You can also create and modify materials using the Materials window. The Materials window offers many settings to modify properties of the material.
The use of mapping adds complexity and texture realism to the material. For example, you can replicate a paved road with asphalt by using a noise map and apply it to an object representing the road in the scene. Use the tile map to replicate a brick and mortar pattern.
Use the Advanced Lighting Override to add properties to the material that affect the rendered scene when lit by indirect illumination from global illumination and/or final gather. After maps are applied to a material and modified to your preference, a map can be adjusted on the object using various tools that are available from the Materials panel on the ribbon.
Materials Tool Palettes – The Materials tool palettes gives you quick access to preset materials selections.
Materials Library – A library of over 400 materials and textures is included with the product. The materials are available on tool palettes after they are installed and are displayed on the palettes with a checkered underlay.
A typical installation installs less than 100 materials on the Materials tool palettes. An additional 300 or more materials are available by optionally installing the Materials library. The library can be accessed through the Configuration button on Add/Remove features in the installer. By default, all of the Materials tool palettes are installed in the Tool Palettes File Locations path specified on the Files tab of the Options dialog box. (See Texture Maps Search Path on the Files tab for the location of texture maps.)
Tool Palettes Window – The individual material palettes in the Tool Palettes window contain materials that you can apply to objects in the scene.
Create Materials – A material is defined by a number of properties. The available options depend on the material type selected. You can create a new material in the Materials window. In the Materials Editor section of the Materials window you can select a type of material and a template to create your new material.
After you set these properties, you can modify your new materials even more by using maps, such as texture or procedural maps, Advanced Lighting Override, Material Scaling & Tiling, and Material Offset & Preview settings. In the Material Editor panel, you can set the following properties
- Realistic and Realistic Metal types. Materials based on physical qualities. You can select a material template from a list of predefined materials such as Ceramic Tile, Glazed, Fabric, or Glass, and so on.
- Advanced and Advanced Metal types. Materials with more options, including properties that you can use to create special effects; for example, simulated reflections. Advanced and Advanced Metal types do not offer material templates.
One material is always available in a new drawing, GLOBAL; by default, it uses the Realistic template. This material is applied to all objects by default until the material is changed on an object. You can use this material as a base for creating a new material. Depending on the type of material you use, one or more of the following properties may be available for you to refine your material.
Color – The color of a material on an object is different in different areas of the object. For example, when you look at a red sphere, it does not appear to be uniformly red. The sides away from the light appear to be a darker red than the sides facing the light. The reflection highlight appears the lightest red. In fact, if the red sphere is very shiny, its highlight may appear to be white.
You can set three types of colors for a material that uses the Advanced or two colors for the Advanced Metal material type.
- The main color of the material.
- The color that appears on faces lighted by ambient light alone. The ambient color may be the same as the diffuse color.
- The color of a highlight on a shiny material. The specular color may be the same as the diffuse color.
The Realistic and Realistic Metal templates use only Diffuse color.
Shininess – The reflective quality of the material defines the degree of shininess or roughness. To simulate a shiny surface, the material has a small highlight, and its specular color is lighter, perhaps even white. A rougher material has a larger highlight that is closer to the main color of the material.
Other Properties – The following properties can be used to create specific effects
- A completely opaque object does not allow the passage of light through its surface. An object with no opacity is transparent. (Not available for metal material types.)
- The reflection slider controls how reflective the material is. When set to 100, the material is fully reflective and the surrounding environment is reflected in the surface of any object to which the material is applied. (Not available for metal material types.)
- In translucent materials, light rays are bent as they pass through the material and thus distort objects that are seen through the material. For example, at 1.0, the object behind the transparent object is not distorted. At 1.5, the object is distorted greatly, as if it were seen through a glass marble. (Not available for metal material types.)
| Material | Index of Refraction |
| Vacuum | 1.0 (exactly) |
| Air | 1.0003 |
| Water | 1.3333 |
| Glass | 1.5 to 1.7 |
| Diamond | 2.419 |
- A translucent object transmits light, but also scatters some light within the object; for example, frosted glass. The translucency value is a percentage: at 0.0, the material is not translucent; at 100.0, the material is as translucent as possible. (Not available for metal material types.)
- Self-illumination. The object appears to be emitting its own light. For example, to simulate neon without using a light source, you could set a self-illumination value greater than zero. No light is cast on other objects.
- Luminance causes a material to simulate being lit by a photometric light source. How much light is emitted is a selected value in photometric units. No light is cast on other objects.
- Two Sided Material. Two Sided Material sets the property of the material as two sided. Set this property if you want both sides of the material to be rendered in the scene.
Apply Materials to Objects and Faces – You can apply a material to individual objects and faces or to objects on a layer. To apply a material to an object or a face (a triangular or quadrilateral portion of a surface object), you can drag the material from a tool palette onto the object. The material is added to the drawing, and it is also displayed as a swatch in the Materials window. When you create or modify a material in the Materials window, you can
- Drag the material swatch directly onto objects in your drawing.
- Drag the material swatch onto the active tool palette to create a material tool.
- Apply a material to objects by layer ( MATERIALATTACH). The material is applied to all objects on the layer whose Material property is set to BYLAYER (the default).
- Assign a material to an object by clicking the Apply Materials to Object button in the Materials palette.