Materials Editor

Base Color

Set the color of the materials.

Highlight Color

• White - the default reflective highlight color
• Metallic - material reflective color matches the materials base color
• Custom - used to specify a different reflective color

Metallic Color

By default, the mirror color of a nXt material is white. If the material's mirror color is identical to the object's base color, the material looks metallic.

Reflective Intensity

• Use numbers around 0.7 to 0.8 for reflective floors, etc.
• Use numbers around 1.5 for plastic.
• Use numbers very close to 1.0 for a mirror.

Refelctive Sharpness

• Use numbers around 0.2 for plastic.
• Use numbers very close to 1.0 for a mirror.

Transparency

You can also make an object of face transparent by giving it a transparent material.

You can select a predefined Revit transparent material from the Material Dialog, such as glass: , or you can create a new transparent material, (or edit an existing one), by defining its opacity.

Index of Refraction

Refraction refers to the bending of light as it passes through a tranparent surface in a Ray Trace renderer.

Translucency

Translucency is a form of Transparency where the light passes through a material, but you cannot see through the material. Note in the image that light from the lamp inside the translucent shade illuminates the wall. But the shade itself is not transparent.

Textures

Images

Image maps, or bitmaps, are two-dimensional patterns created using raster-based paint programs or by scanning photographs or other materials.

Procedural Bumps

Procedural Bumps use mathematical rules to provide the illusion of surface bumpiness in your material. You can add one or more procedural bumpmaps to a base material.

Types of procedural bumps are available:

• Sandpaper
• Rubble
• Pyramid
• Wrinkled
• Marbled

Scale, Strength, and Rotation can be applied to some procedural bumps.

Image Properties

Tile Size

Controls the size of the image map. Image maps used in material definitions are always tiled. Tile size is displayed in current drawing units.

You can either maintain the aspect ratio or unlock the relationship and scale the x- and y-directions of the tile size independently.

Mirror Tiles

Causes your bump map to be mirrored both in the x and y directions as it is tiled. This can sometimes produce adequate results using bitmaps that do not tile correctly by guaranteeing that the tile edges are continuous. Mirroring the tiles is sometimes useful as it guarantees continuity at the tile edges if your images do not tile correctly.

Masking

Masking lets you restrict the use of your image map to a portion of the image only. The masked portions either have no affect on the underlying material, or you can make the underlying material completely transparent. Two types of masking are provided: color and alpha channel.

Strength

Strength of 1.00 means all of the object's color will be derived from the colors of your bitmap. If this setting is less than 1.00, color attributes of the underlying material show through.

Bump

Strength makes your bitmap look embossed. Bump varies between 1.0 and -1.0. Negative numbers make the bitmap appear indented.