AutoCAD® has a large library of materials, but you can create your own custom material or import materials from other drawings. If you have a specific material requirement with specific properties, then you can create a custom material.

In this article, I will demonstrate by making three different type of materials with totally different properties. Let’s start with a wood type material.

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Wood Type Material

To make this material I will use the texture image as shown in Figure 1. You can use your own texture as well.

Figure 1: Wood texture

Type RMAT on the command line and press Enter to open the Materials Browser palette. Select the Global material from the Document Materials panel and name it Wood. Double-click on this Wood material to open the Materials Editor palette.

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From the Generic tab, click on the Image panel and select the Wood texture. Again double-click on the Image panel of the Materials Editor palette to open the Texture Editor palette. Locate the Scale panel and set the scale of this texture to 12 inches in both the length and width fields. Select Tile from the Horizontal and Vertical fields of the Repeat panel.

Close all open palettes except Materials Browser and make a 3D geometry in the drawing area to test the material. I made a simple cube of 8 inches along length, width, and height. To see the effect of this material, change the Visual Style to Realistic. Now drag and drop the material from the Materials Browser palette to the object in the drawing area. After applying the wood material, the object will look like the image shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Material with wood texture applied on an object

Translucent Glass

In the next example, I will make a simple translucent glass type material, generally seen in window panes and curtain walls. To make this material, make another copy of Global material from the Document Materials panel of the Materials Browser palette. Name it Glass.

Double-click on the Glass material to open the Materials Editor palette and click on the Color field from the Generic panel. Select a color from the color swatch—I have selected 170 index color for the material. Also change the Glossiness value to 100 from the Generic panel.

Click on the Transparency check box in the Materials Editor window to make its options active. Change the Transparency value to 40 and Translucency to 70. You can also experiment with slightly dissimilar values of transparency and translucency. Also, select Glass from the Refraction drop-down menu.

Click on the Tint check box to make its options active. Select Index color 252 for the tint and close the Materials Editor window. Now drag and drop this material on a 3D solid. The final object after applying material looks like the image shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Translucent glass material applied on an object

Tree with Material Map

You can also make a material in AutoCAD that looks like a real-life object such as a tree, person, or vehicle using Material Mapping. To use the material map, you need to use an image with a white background and its alpha or opacity map, which is the black and white part of the image. In the alpha, the black part represents transparent while the white part represents opaque portions of the image. For our example, I am using image and alpha as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Image and its alpha used for creating tree material

Start with duplicating the Global material and name it Tree. Now double-click on Tree Material from the Document Materials panel and expand the Generic tab.

Click on the image box and select the tree image with the white background. For my example, I have selected an image that is 10 inches in length and width. Double-click on the image in the Materials Editor palette and expand the Scale panel in the Texture Editor palette. Set the scale to 10 inches in width and height and select None in the Horizontal and Vertical fields of the Repeat panel.

Click on the Cutouts check box of the Materials Editor palette (Figure 5) and select Tree Opacity Map. Here, also change the sample size to 10 inches in height and width in the Scale field. Select None in the Horizontal and Vertical fields of the Repeat panel.

Figure 5: Materials Editor palette

Close all open palettes except Materials Browser and make a rectangular surface that is 10 inches in length and width. Drag and drop the tree material on this surface and change the Visual Style to Realistic if it is not already selected.

After applying the material, the tree looked like the image shown in Figure 6. In renderings, the shadow of the tree will also take the shape of the visible portion of the image and it will appear realistic.

Figure 6: Rendering with tree material

Conclusion

Apart from these three materials, you can also make other type of materials with very different properties such as an illuminating material that can be used as a light source. In addition to making the materials, you can export them to other drawings. To export the material, copy any object on which the material is applied to the drawing and the material will also be copied to it. Make sure you also transfer the images used for creating these materials, keeping these images in the same folder that contains the drawing.

Jaiprakash Pandey is a Mechanical Engineer currently working as a CAD Corporate trainer. He is an AutoCAD Certified Professional and an Autodesk Expert Elite member. He provides training in AutoCAD, CATIA, and other CAD products to corporate clients. He is a regular contributor to AUGIWorld magazine and also develops AutoCAD video courses for Pluralsight and his own platform, SourceCAD. You can reach him on his blog: www.thesourcecad.com

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In this article, we are going to attach materials to our model. We are going to skip the artificial lighting and save it for later. However, we already have sunlight for now and it’s enough to create a photorealistic rendering. You probably now can’t wait to see how your model looks like when we render it. So let us just do it.

Rendering materials are now very easy to create and to use. In AutoCAD 2011, we have standard ‘Autodesk materials’ that also available for many Autodesk products, such as 3ds Max, Inventor, and Revit.

Using Autodesk Material Library

Before we can use the materials, we need to load them to our document. Open material browser by clicking material browser in render tab, materials panel.

AutoCAD will open materials palette. This material palette is for AutoCAD 2011. You will not see Autodesk material library in AutoCAD 2010.

In this palette, expand the Autodesk library and find group of material you want to use (1). Click it, and you will see the materials within the group in (2). Find which one you like, and click it. By clicking the material, you add the rendering material to document materials (3). Continue to add materials for wall’s paint, steel, glass, and the seating cover.

That is easy, right?

Attaching Material By Layer

Now we already have the materials in our document.The next thing to do is attaching the material to our object.

The easiest way to do it if you separate the objects by layer. You can attach materials to each layer, without having to attach it to each object. Expand the materials panel and click attach by layer.

AutoCAD will open a dialog box. Choose your material on the left column, then drag and drop it to the layer.

Click OK when you are done.

Attaching Materials By Selection

Attaching materials to layer is the easiest way. However, we still need to attach materials to some object that is not using the same material with it’s layer. It doesn’t make sense if you have to create several layers for walls, if they have different materials, right?

Applying it is easy. There are several ways to do it. You can drag and drop the material from material browser to your object. But the more convenient way to me is select the object first, then choose material that I want from material browser. Right click, and choose assign to selection.

Apply materials to all your objects. Then you can test your material by rendering it. Below is my first material rendering test using medium quality. Not good enough, but I believe you get the idea. I’ll try to set different materials later, so we can see better result in the final render.

Next, we are going to create our own materials.