AutoCAD 2007 and higher versions

I decided to explain subject of render material subject that is wondered by many people. We have a long way to go, so let me start immediately. In AutoCAD 2007, materials are managed from MATERIAL PANEL. In order to open this panel, you can use this command:

 

Fig. 1

You can see the control panel in Fig. 1. There is the list of defined materials on the upper part of panel, and there is a small menu under it. There are material templates, light properties, texture properties and opacity and bump map properties on the lower part.

In this article, we will first see how to create a simple material. To create a new material, we are using ‘Create New Material’ in the small menu. In this first article, we will create a blue plastic material, let’s name the material as ‘Blue Plastic’ New material will immediately appear in the list. The most important property of render material is light they reflect. It is same in real life, different materials also reflect light differently. During RENDER, we call this property ‘diffuse’. Our material is created as gray by default. But as we want it to be blue, then we should click on the color box and select a soft blue (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Even now, we already have a half matte blue. Let’s draw a cube on screen and assign this material to it. After assigning is complete, then we get what is shown in Fig. 3.
 

Fig. 3

Here, we can see a slight reflection. The reason for that is ‘Shininess’ property in light settings is adjusted to 50%. As shininess property decreases, light becomes smoother and is diffused over a larger area. Controversially, as shininess increases, then light will be reflected from a very small area and more sharply just like it does from a billiards ball. You can change shininess and observe the effects on screen. ( You should set view property to REALISTIC from DASHBOARD ). Up to now, we have learned about the color and shininess properties of material. After adjusting shininess properties then we should make RENDER to see the exact results of our settings. First of all, let’s draw a surface under the cube and assign the preset checkered material to it. By this way, we can see the result more easily. If you know how to do it, then you can also add a light to the scene. I will talk about lights in another article. As the scene is ready, let’s set shininess property of the new material to 70%, and ‘Refraction’ value to 1.75. By using this combination, our material will be shiny enough to reflect light (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

As you can see, only by setting there properties ( diffuse, shininess, refraction ), we obtained a shiny material just like a billiards ball. The fourth property ‘Self illumination’ is used to create materials which disperse light by themselves, i.e. a light spreading sphere. However, in real life, such a material must be transparent and a light source is inserted into a sphere that is covered with this material. However, in textures that are created by computers, it will create better effects to combine a light source with a self illuminatiosn effect (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5

Even though the subject of this article was plastic material, let me talk about transparency affect a little bit also. If we change ‘Opacity’ ( transparency ) property in material control panel in between 20% and 0%, then we start to visualize transparency effect (Fig. 6, 20%). You can also see that by changing opacity, color of the shadow also changes.

Fig. 6

Our series of articles will continue with texture, mapping, bump and light topics.

Technorati Tags: AutoCAD, render, material, diffuse, refraction

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