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AutoCAD 2008 Material Definition Toolpalette 1

3 Comments Sep-15-2008 | Posted by Erhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

Previously, we have already explained how to create a texture material in AutoCAD 2007 in our previous articles. Even though drawing file format is same in AutoCAD 2008 and AutoCAD 2007, there are significant changes in material and lights definitions.

Before starting my article, I would like to give you some information about render window of AutoCAD. First rendering capability in AutoCAD arrived together with a plug-in named as AccuRender. It is a magnificent software, it is still of grate use even today. I suggest that you should take a look at its web page. Later on, the company who prepared AutoDESK 3D studio bought it. After that, a new interface called AVE Render ( AutoShade ) was added in AutoCAD and then we were able to make rendering with significantly high quality. However, AVE Render user interface was not user friendly enough and there were quite a bit of complaints about it. Its way of working was also very unusual. It used to add material, light, mapping and scene definitions to invisible entities (block) that were created by a locked layer called ASHADE as extended data. In spite of all these disadvantages, autoshade was able to make a good quality and error-free rendering. After receiving many complaints, a modern material editor was added to AutoCAD 2007. Objects like material, lights etc. are also stored in tables in AutoCAD like other objects. It looks like, AutoDESK has added enough properties to each of the members in material table so that they can all necessary information can be stored. However, all of these properties became functional in AutoCAD 2008. After this small introduction, we can start our article.

As you already know from before, we can enter material definition user interface by entering MATERIAL command or MAT alias. When we enter the command, we get the following window as shown in Fig. 1 in AutoCAD 2008.

Fig.1

This window shows different material settings by means of different sections.

Available Materials in Drawing : It includes small pictures showing material properties and a small button menu. In addition, it also has a very functional right click menu.

Nested Map Navigation : In this combo list, you can see the sub-components of the selected material and several properties (Fig. 2).

Fig.2

Material Editor : We can make the most of editing of materials in this part. We will explain about the details in upcoming articles.

Fig.3

Maps : Here, we can define the textures for materials in three channels.

Fig.4

Advanced Lightning Override : This feature is only available for materials that has ‘Realistic’ and ‘Realistic Metal’ properties turned on. It is used to define how the material will respond when it is exposed to photometric lights.

Material Scaling & Tiling : It is used to change tiling and scaling properties of material texture in one channel ( diffuse, opacity etc.) or in all channels in a synchronized way.

Material Offset & Preview : This is the section where it is defined how the material texture is placed over the entity with respect to which origin, rotation angle and includes a preview window. ( Fig.5 ).

Fig.5

All the changes that you make in material definition, which are explained briefly above, are immediately going to be reflected into the material table. We will explain more about these definitions in detail in our next articles.

Until then, good bye and have a nice day.

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