“I want my front door like this. Can you put it in your model and render it for me?”

What do you think if your client want a door like below?

It definitely take some time to create it. And become harder if your client is quite hard to be satisfied. He may come back later and want another door model!

If you want to represent a door like that, especially for quick presentation, you don’t need to model it. In the previous tutorial, we created a painting with material texture. Well, you can do the same with this door! I’ve seen many people have used this trick. However, some people never use it. When I show it, many of them are surprised. So let’s see how we can do it.

I quickly model walls,floor, and a door like this. The door is simply a 3D solid box.

Then I created a rendering material using the image. I set the scale to match the door size.

How long do you need to create that?

This is the door I rendered in medium quality. Not bad for a few minutes modeling. I wonder how it would take to actually create the model…

Let us start. Open your material browser. On the left top of material browser palette, you can see create material dropdown. Click it, and you will see several types of rendering materials available. Autodesk has introduced this several versions ago. It is easier for us to create our own materials. However, if you want to achieve certain effects, sometimes you need to use generic material, which has all the parameters available.

Find which type of material you want to create. AutoCAD will open material editor palette.

Rendering Material Template

Choosing the right type of material can make the creating process simpler. Let us review the different materials below. AutoCAD will only show you parameters that are relevant to that type of material. This can make us easier and focus to only what’s important. For example, for glass we mostly only care about reflection, refraction, and roughness. We do not need to see other parameters, so AutoCAD hide it. Plastic material has different behavior. See that AutoCAD will show you different parameters.

Material template for plastic	Material template for Solid Glass

We are going to add more accessories to our interior design. We will add a painting. Download the exercise file here. Your challenge now is to create your own material for the frame and the painting image. Create a wood material. After you created it, AutoCAD should open material editor. If it doesn’t, double click the new material from document materials.

Material Editor

In material editor, you will see 3 separate parts.

(1) is where you can change the preview/swatch shape and the preview quality. For reflective materials, you can see better reflection effect in sphere objects. For pattern materials, probably canvas is more convenient.

(2) is where you can create a new material. You can also rename material here.

(3) is where you can change the material texture. You can use predefined texture or use bitmap image.

There are more options available. Most of the parameters can be changed using slider or selecting from a list.

Feel free to play around with material editor. I don’t do many changes. Only change the texture to noise, change the noise color, and change the finish to semi-gloss varnish. After you have done, apply the material to the frame. Refer to previous tutorial how to do it.

Texture Editor

Now let us do an exercise to create a new material. Use generic material type. Generic material has all the parameters available in AutoCAD. We are going to define the painting. You can use your own photograph, or use any images.

Click image to define the material texture.

Browse for your image. And click open. You should see texture editor opened.

In texture editor, expand the transform category, then expand scale. Define the image scale. In the provided drawing, it is 800×1000 mm size.

Expand repeat category. Change the horizontal and vertical to none. We don’t want this painting to appear tiled, but as a single image.

Apply the material to the pic layer.

Test the materials by rendering your model.

Well, not bad…

Saving Material To Library

After we created several materials, we would want to save it to our own library. You don’t want to recreate your materials every time you want to render your model, don’t you?

In materials library, expand my materials category. It’s at the bottom of Autodesk library. Click to open it. You will see no materials on the right panel, unless you have done this before.

You can directly drag and drop your materials here. Or if you want to create your own category first, right click above my materials, and click create category.

Now you have the materials in your own library. You can use  it in your later design.

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.

If you already downloaded the DWG file from the previous tutorial, I apologize. I forgot to add floor to the model, you can download this one to continue with this tutorial. And of course, you can use your own model.

Turning Off Materials

Why not we define the objects’ material first? Setting up rendering light can take a lot of time. You need to do several rendering tests until you get what you want. Having your materials defined already, will make the rendering slower. Especially when you have many reflective and transparent materials. With no materials defined, the rendering will be faster to get the proper lighting. After we satisfied with the lighting, then we define the materials.

First, we need to turn the material off. Go to render tab, materials panel. Check if the materials/textures off. Turn it off if it’s still on.

This is a pretty simple model. If your model have several windows or opening, you can try to set the light to come through from your preferred opening/window. Our objective is to get the solar light come through from the window, and in this model we only have one. So let’s turn off the window’s glass layer. In this file, the layer would be 3D-GLAZ-GLAS.

The next layers you are going to turn off is totally up to you. In very complex model, it would be wise if we turn off objects that is not too important in setting up lights. If you have powerful machine and working on a relatively small model, you may not feel the difference. But when you have a bit old machine and the model has many geometries, then this can help. This model is quite simple, but let us hide the furniture to set up our lighting fixtures. Leave the wall, ceiling, and floor layers on.

Geographic Location

To define the solar light properly, we need to set the geographic location. Click set location in Sun & Location tab.

AutoCAD will give you options how you want to define the location. For this tutorial, choose enter location values. We will have another dialog box opened. You can define the location by typing the latitude and longitude. Or simpler way to do it is by using use map.

Pick your location and click OK until all dialog are closed. I use Jakarta as my location. Your result will look different if you choose other location. But it doesn’t matter.

Sky and Sun Properties

Now let us turn on the sky. If we don’t turn it on, the sky will be black. Not so nice for daylight rendering, right?

Next, let us set the sun. click the sun status icon.

When you do it for the first time, AutoCAD will give you some options. Choose to turn off default lighting. Default lighting is ugly. We are going to use natural light from the sun. After you turn off the default lighting, you could see the date and time slider active.

Turn on shadows. Change the setting from no shadows to full shadows.

Now try to change the date and time until you can see the sun light come through the window. Do it until you feel the light angle is good. In photography, morning and afternoon sun light is considered as the perfect time. It gives a great lighting depth and covers wider area than when the sun right above your head.

Rendering test

We are going to test our light settings, but this is not a final render yet. So you can use lower quality to render it. I suggest you to try on medium quality. Draft and low quality give very rough lighting effect. Medium quality is more relevant. Click the small arrow on the lower right of render panel to open advanced render settings.

In the advanced render settings, change the render quality to medium. And find indirect illumination category in that palette. Click the light bulb next to global illumination to turn it on.

Without indirect light, we will not see the effect of the bouncing lights. Turning it on will make the rendering longer. If you are experienced, you may be able to predict the final result without turning it on. But let us try with the indirect light on. Click render and wait a few minutes to see the result.

I think this is nice. Now let us adjust the exposure. This is totally up to you. I feel the render result is not bright enough, and not enough contrast. So I will adjust them. Click adjust exposure to open the dialog.

AutoCAD will open a dialog. There are several settings that you can change to make the rendering result nicer. You can click the up and down arrow or simply type new value. The preview window will update as soon as you change the values. Do it until you feel it’s good enough.

Now let us test the rendering again. This is what I get. Better, right?

Remember, in the real rendering setup, you may need to do several trial before you get satisfied result. And finally, after we feel it’s nice enough, test it with your objects on.

Not bad, isn’t it?

If you are using your model, and have different result with mine, I would like to see how it looks. And I believe the others would like to compare with theirs. So put in on you blog, Flickr, Photobucket, CAD Notes facebook page, or anywhere people can see it. Share the link to your rendering result using the comment form below.

Aren’t you feel excited how the result would looks like? Keep following this tutorial! We will do it together!