Explore the impact of materials assignment on rendered 3D models, with a particular focus on managing and modifying materials for accurate rendering. This article underscores the importance of paying attention to material assignments, as changes could inadvertently alter the appearance of your final render.
Key Insights
- The materials assigned to elements in a 3D model heavily influence the final rendered appearance. It's crucial to ensure material assets are set correctly for an accurate rendering.
- When modifying material attributes, it's recommended to duplicate or replace the asset with a new one before making changes. This way, other materials sharing the same asset aren't unintentionally modified in the rendering process.
- The article also emphasizes the importance of using the rendering appearance to pick the RGB color that best represents a material, as this could drastically change the look of the final render. This also applies to similar materials assigned to different parts of the model, such as curtain wall mullions.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
For this next series of videos, we're going to take a look at the materials that we're applying to each of these elements. Now it's pretty obvious when you look at some of them, like this brick wall, that materials have already been assigned, and so if we were to take a look at some of the attributes here, you can see that Brick Common has the brick surface pattern, the color, and even the cut pattern. Now it's important to note that none of these things that we're looking at here will have an impact on what an object is going to look like when we render it.
This is important because when we look at the Appearance tab here, we will actually see the material asset that is being used to generate the rendering. So this is the brick that we're going to see when we do a rendering, and that's what we need to ensure is set correctly for the rest of our materials so we can get an accurate rendering. I'm going to hit OK to get out of this dialog box, and what we're going to look at here—this is going to be a pretty simple setup—is the material which is going to be our sloped roof.
It's also going to represent the same material for our piece here, and we're going to use something that already exists but modify it a little bit. When I go to Edit Type, Edit Structure, you can see it's set to 'By Category', which is a default material. But if I were to go in and pick a material like Aluminum, you can see here that Aluminum is assigned an appearance based on the Satin material.
I can go in and change these parameters, but if I do that, any other material that has this Aluminum and this Satin asset assigned to it will also be modified in the rendering. We always want to make sure we're either duplicating or replacing an asset with something else that we're bringing into the project before we make changes to it. If I know that this material is the only one that's going to use this Satin asset, then we're okay.
Then I can go in and make the changes and tint it or do whatever I want to the material. So that being said, we can go in and say, "Okay, well we've got these different options for Aluminum." We can do something like an Anodized Aluminum and give it a color that we'd like to use—maybe a warm dark gray. You can use whatever color you want here; it doesn't matter too much. But I could assign it that color, and you can see a preview of it, and I can hit OK. But if you notice, both of these—two different materials—in our Material Browser now look the same.
%20(1).png)
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
When I hit OK here, we won't see any changes in our model, but if we were to do a rendering, it would clearly be very different from what we had before. This material—both of them being the same—is now set to that Satin, and what I could do is actually change this to use the rendering appearance, and it will pick the RGB color that best represents that material. I like to do that because it gives me a good idea of what these are going to look like, and you'll notice what else happened here.
Curtain wall mullions changed as well because they're all assigned that same material. So it's something you want to make sure you're paying attention to, because you could inadvertently make a change to a material when you really didn’t intend to.
