Explore the process of applying materials to railings in a design project, with a detailed look at the selection of stainless steel for metal components and consideration of individual family elements such as balusters. Gain insights into the importance of material properties and the potential challenges of modification within the project's context.
Key Insights
- The selection of materials for a project, such as stainless steel for railings, involves consideration of aesthetic appeal and functionality. A semi-polished finish is preferred to avoid the mirror-like effect of a polished finish.
- Materials are assigned to individual elements within the project, such as balusters, which are each their own individual family. This process requires attention to each family type and the assignment of the chosen material.
- Despite the potential complexity and less intuitive nature of the process, once the pattern of assigning materials is understood, it becomes easier. Any modification to the look of the material will affect all elements to which it is applied, underscoring the importance of careful selection.
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For our railing materials, I think we want to go with stainless steel for all of the metal on here. And the glass is going to be fine as is. We'll go ahead and take a look at what materials are being applied to these here.
And so we'll go into our Rail Structure. And you can see that the materials here are all just set to By Category. And we can just start typing in stainless and see what we get.
And we got lucky here because there's one that's already applied. And this is a Semi-Polished Stainless Steel.
And I think that's a good option to use here. If we get too much of a mirror finish, it starts to look a little bit more like all the materials around it and you don't get the good look. We're going to go with that one and hit OK.
And then we'll just apply that material to everything but the glass. And then we'll hit OK. The railings are pretty simple because we just modify the material within this dialog box.
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But the balusters are each their own individual families. We have to do that in each family individually. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pop in here and take a note of which ones we're using.
We're using Baluster Square 3/4" and Baluster Steel Flat Upright. So I've got those noted. And we're going to go ahead and look at those families.
And the easiest way to get to those is going to be from your Project Browser. And we're looking for Railings in here underneath Families. And if I expand that, you can see we've got our different types.
So here's our Baluster Square. And that was the 3/4" type. If I go in here, right-click on it and say Type Properties.
There's a material that I can assign to it here, and we're looking for stainless steel. So you can see it changed there. And then the next one I have is going to be this flat bar one, which is this guy right here.
And luckily, we only have one type, which takes some guesswork out of it because, you know, this one had four here. And we'll do the same thing, assign the material, and you get that little indicator that it's correct because this is going to show as a black material. Now we just have the top rail and the handrail that we have to modify.
When I select it here and go to Edit Type, you can see we have our top rail and we have our handrail. Now when you look at both of these, you can see that there are no material parameters for that. And the circular one has another dialog box we can go to, as does the elliptical.
When we go beyond through there, you can see we have more properties with, most importantly, a material. So it clearly would be a lot better if a lot of these things were in one location. So it's a little bit less intuitive than some of the other things we've been doing.
But once we figure out the pattern, it's not so bad. And the benefit is we're using the same material for all of these. And so if we want to modify the look of it, it's all going to be on this stainless steel material.
So that's where we would make the change. There we go. We've got all our materials set.
Now we just need to get the flooring in for this area here. Right now it's just shown as the concrete. And so we'll take a look at that next.
