Explore how to modify materials and finishes in architectural models for enhanced visual representation. Discover the process of duplication and modification of materials, adjustment of color schemes, and the importance of matching your drawings with the legend for improved comprehension.
Key Insights
- The article talks about the importance of accurately representing different finishes and materials in an architectural model. It demonstrates how to modify finishes, such as changing the primary color or adding a different accent.
- Duplication of materials is discussed, including the need to use the 'duplicate material and assets' option to create variations of a material. Changing the names of these duplicates helps to keep track of them and their differences.
- Lastly, the article highlights the significance of ensuring your drawings match the legend for clear and consistent representation. This involves editing type properties and modifying materials to align with the legend.
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So looking at the model, we did a pretty good job in our previous course, you know, setting the materials and getting everything kind of set up the way that we wanted to. And we can go ahead and take a look at the different finishes we have. We've got this plaster, we've got this one, which is kind of going to represent one of the colors.
And then we can go in and we can say, well, you know, maybe we want this one to be something different. And what that allows us to do is to say, okay, well, maybe our primary color is going to be this material, which might be the gray color versus the brown, which is what you're seeing here. But at this point, we want to have like a different accent since we're going from concrete to glass to then a metal panel on the face here.
And then let the body of the building with the plaster be where the punch windows are. We can take, say, this type, and I can do Edit Type and Duplicate, and everything's going to be the same. So I'll just let it be number two there.
And then we just need to modify that plaster finish, which in this case, it's calling out as an EIFS finish, which isn't the greatest, but it'll work fine for our class here. And then that's the material, which has just the sand pattern on it with no background finish. And it's kind of showing this brown, which is fine—we can deal with that in a second.
But we can go ahead and make a duplicate of this material. And let me see if I can get that to show up on the screen here. Oddly, mine is popping up on the wrong screen.
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But what we can do is if we were to pick this material, you can right-click on it and say Duplicate. And we want to use the Duplicate Material and Assets option. And all of my options are showing up on my adjacent screen.
So let's see if I can get that to work. And the Duplicate Material and Assets is going to allow us to pick a different material. For this one, I can go ahead and say—so if that one is going to be our dark gray color, I can call it, you know, PC-2, since we know that that's going to be my PC-2 material.
And then for this one, if I rename it, I can call it PC-1. And that helps us just keep everything in line here. So PC-2 had the sand pattern with the solid fill in the back, and it was that light gray color.
And then PC-1 had just the sand feel on it. So that one was our dark brown color. And then our color for PC-2 was like a darker gray color.
And so this is just a material appearance thing—we can pop back in and make those adjustments however we see fit. So I'm going to hit OK on that. And OK again.
And so now you can see we've got like another material here, which—that’s super dark. We'll probably be adjusting that. But what I want to do is the portions here, which is this parapet wall that I want to have be our second plaster—I want to make sure that those are all set correctly.
And so we're going to go ahead and rectify that dark material, which is this one that we picked in here. And a lot of times, I'll try to find more of like a warmer gray, especially with this tone that we're using. But this is obviously very subjective, so you can pick and choose this however you want.
And I just noticed my background color—I had that backwards. So let's go ahead and adjust that background color to be the right gray. Things should look a lot better after that.
And there we go—we've got our two different plaster colors. The next thing we need to do is take a look at how we're defining our spandrel glass material. If you remember, we had that set up with a fill pattern that was the crosshatch with the gray on the background.
And so what I could do is, since we already have a spandrel panel for a material associated with it, we can edit the type properties and then modify the material to match our legend. And this is important because you want your drawings to match the legend that you're showing. So I'm just going to use the same properties that we use for the legend and set that up.
So I've got those all set correctly, and I'll hit OK a couple times. And now you can see we've got spandrel material set to the properties that we were hoping to use there. And so if I spin around to this side, that’s where it's going to expose mainly the work that we're going to have to do.
And there are a couple of things that we have to do in here. Number one, we've got to define which of these panels we want to have be spandrel. And then we need to make sure that we have some way of annotating that because there's a lot going on here.
We're probably going to do an enlarged elevation plane.
