Materials

Toolbar: Rendering > Materials ()

Menu: View > Rendering > Materials

Keyboard: MATERIALS

Alias: RMAT

Assigns material properties to entities, enhancing the visual appearance of the model when it is rendered with the Full Render command. Use Materials to define the reflectance and transparency properties of surfaces in your model when it is rendered. The default material is Shiny Plastic.


NOTE The Shade and Render commands do not use material properties.


When a model is rendered, the appearance of any point on any surface is dependent on several factors, such as lighting, orientation to the viewer and light sources, and material properties. The color of the surfaces is taken from the color of the entities that define those surfaces. How the model is illuminated is controlled by the Lighting command. Using the Materials command, you assign different material types, such as molded plastic, metal, or glass, to model surfaces, which causes them to look more realistic when illuminated.

Material property definitions are saved in the drawing file.

To define or modify material properties

Select entities: Select the entities for which you want to define or modify material properties, and then right-click the mouse or press Enter. On the Materials dialog box, define or modify the reflectance type and transparency of the selected entities. The next time you render the model with the Full Render command, the selected entities use the new material properties.

Dialog Box Options

Reflectance Type Determines how light reflects off surfaces in the model. These reflectance types can be used to simulate many materials other than those implied by the names.

Shiny Plastic The default for all entities, this material is of medium reflectance and is not transparent by default.

Shiny Metal This material is reflective and is not transparent by default.

Dull Metal This material is not reflective and is not transparent by default.

Mirror This material is reflective and is not transparent by default. The Mirror setting is the only one that demonstrates true reflective behavior.

Glass This material is less reflective than mirror and is refractive by default. The Glass setting is the only one that demonstrates true refractive behavior.

Transparency Determines how much of an underlying image (the base, for example) is visible through the surface of the selected entity.


NOTE  To make your model render more efficiently, avoid glass materials and use the transparency setting instead. It takes significantly longer to calculate true refractive behavior than basic transparency. True refractive behavior is not necessary for most models. For example, the amount of distortion created by window glass in a building is trivial, so it would not be efficient to make windows in a model truly refractive.


Tell me about...

Backgrounds

Base Materials

Hiding

Lighting

Rendering

Render Settings

Shading