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AutoCAD 2008 Material Definition Toolpalette 2

Post a Comment Sep-16-2008 | Posted by Erhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

Here we continue our series of articles about AutoCAD 2008 Material Definition Window. Let’s start with the first section of material definition window.

Available Materials in Drawing : This section is used to define the relationship between the drawing and the materials (Fig. 1).

Fig.1
You can use the small symbol that has an arrow shape in two directions at the bottom part of button menu to change the size of this window. The button on the upper right corner that is used for changing the view mode is used for transition between list and single material view every time it is pressed (Fig. 2).

Fig.2

When you are in single material view, the arrows on the right and left side is used for transition between the materials. However, it is quite difficult to find the material that you are looking for when you have many different numbers of materials in your drawing.

On the bottom part, you can see that there is a menu made up of small buttons. There is a button on the left side and a floating menu that is made up of three buttons and there are cube, cylinder and sphere symbols in it. As you can understand, you simple select the type of entity over which you would like to make a preview of the material that you select. In my opinion, the most appropriate one is the sphere. Just beside it, there is a checkered button . This button is used to make the background of the material to look in a checkered way. It will be very useful when you are working with refractory or transparent materials. The third and the last one on the left side belongs to preview of lights. You have two options. Background on and off. You can obtain a nice looking background lightning when you open the background lights.

Fig.3

The menu on the right side is about the materials. First button is for creating a new material. Each new material has a name and description (Fig. 4).

Fig.4

As you can see, you can use ‘.’ when giving names. I suggest that you should use this option if you are creating a library. Second button is used to delete the material from the drawing. However, in order to do this, the material must have been used in the drawing. If you have no idea whether the material is used in the drawing or not, the third button is here to help you. When you press this button, a symbol appears on the lower right corner of the preview window (Fig. 5).

Fig.5

Last two buttons are used to assign the material that is selected to the entities inside the drawing. In this window, there is also a right click (short-cut) menu. It is opened when you right click on any material (Fig. 6).

Fig.6

There are more options that what we have learned so far in this menu.

Select Objects with Material : It shows all the entities that is textured with the material that you have selected.

Edit Name and Description : It is used to change the name and description of the material.

Export to Active Tool Palette : If it is turned on, then it copies the material that you are working at the moment to the active tool palette. It is possible to drag-and-drop the material from the tool palette over the entity.

Copy & Paste : It is the standard copy-paste operation that you are familiar with. During pasting, the new entity will appear just at the right side of the selected entity.

Size : In this side, you can define the sizes of thumbnails. AutoCAD prefers to call these entities ‘swatch’ .

That’s the end of this article, see you in the next article of this series.

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