Overview

An AutoCAD rendering material is a set of properties that controls the appearance of a surface object during a rendering. For example, you can create a material that is shiny and red, and attach that material to one or more surface objects such as a polygon mesh, a 3D face, or a 3D solid to have those surfaces appear to be shiny and red when they are rendered.

This chapter

• describes the properties, or attributes as they are generally called, that can be assigned to a material;

• explains how bitmap images can be incorporated into rendering materials to simulate bricks, floor tile, and other pattered material;

• tells you how to adjust the scale and location of bitmap images to accommodate various surface shapes and orientations;

• discusses the mechanics of attaching and managing materials;

• describes how to assemble and save a collection of rendering materials.

Materials are created through the RMAT command. Similar to the LIGHT command discussed in the previous chapter, RMAT is a flexible command that uses numerous dialog boxes to define a material. Because creating a material can be an involved process, each material is given a unique name, and you can save a material in a file so that it can be retrieved and used in other drawings. AutoCAD refers to these files of saved materials as material libraries and has a command, MATLIB, for managing them.

For simulating objects that have texture or patterns such as wooden boards, brick walls, shingled roofs, galvanized steel, and tiled floors you...