(click on image to see larger size)

I created simple solid object for the left image. And I simply add thickness for polyline for the right image. Then render it.

So how I can create holes for the objects? By defining rendering material.

We can accomplish the task by adding cutouts map to the rendering material. If you are not familiar with it yet, you may want to read this tutorial to create your own rendering material.

You can create your own map like below, or just save the image. I created the image below using rectangle and hatch tool. Then capture it. AutoCAD will remove the black color from your model when you render it.

Basically you need to create a generic material. This type of material allows you to add cutouts map. Then in materials editor palette, click cutouts to activate it.

Now you need to define the image. Choose the image you created (or downloaded). You are done. Apply the material to your object, then try to render it.

Using this method is not only easier and faster. But also keeps your model simple. It means less time to model and render it. I would love to know how you use cutouts map. And you may want to share the rendering results, so we all can see it!

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

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 complex object 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 solid geometry size.

How long do you need to create that?

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

The nice thing about creating rendering  materials these days, it is a lot easier than it used to be.

Let us start.

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

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

Rendering Material Template

Choosing the right type can make the creating process simpler. Let us review these two different types below. AutoCAD will only show you parameters that are relevant to that type. 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 has different behavior. See that AutoCAD will show you different parameters.

Template for plastic	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. Let’s create wood. After you created it, AutoCAD should open the editor. If it doesn’t, double click the new material.

Material Editor

In this editor, you will see 3 separate parts.

(1) is where you can change the preview/swatch shape and the preview quality. For reflective types, 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 it here.

(3) is where you can change the 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 this 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 it to the frame. Refer to previous tutorial how to do it.

Texture Editor

Now let us do an exercise to create a new one. Use generic 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 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 it to the pic layer.

Test the materials settings by rendering your model.

Well, not bad…

Saving To Library

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

1. Create your model. I will not go there, at least not for now. You can use your own model or use the same model with me. Click here to download the DWG file.
2. Set up your camera view, that will be discussed in this article.
3. Set up lighting, which can be divided to two categories: natural and artificial lighting.
4. Set up materials.
5. Set up rendering configurations.

The first thing we are going to do is setting up our camera view. Type CAMERA and press [enter]. Click first point as camera location, then second point as camera target.

After you place the camera, AutoCAD will give you several options. Give the camera name. Use a name that clearly describe the camera purpose and location. If you have many cameras in your model, you will be grateful that you name it properly.

Don’t worry about the other options. We will change them later. To work in 3D easier, it would be more convenient to have several view angles in our viewport. Now let us configure the viewports. Click viewport configurations, then choose 2 or 3 viewports. Feel free to choose which one you feel more convenient.

I choose 3 viewports so I can view the model from top, front, and right side.

Now select the camera. Cycle between objects by holding [shift] then press [space] several times until the camera is highlighted.

After you select the camera, you should see a camera preview like below.

Now look at your camera. There are several grips that you can use to control the camera location, camera position, camera target, and lens length (FOV).

Move your pointer above at the grip, wait for a while. Now you can see the gizmo or coordinate axis moved there. I’m not sure if we call it gizmo in AutoCAD, but 3ds Max users do.

Move your pointer to any axis, then can see an infinite thin line at the axis. It means the axis is locked. Click and hold your left mouse button, and drag the grip to new position. By using this method, you can easily move the camera grips along any axis, without having to view the model from different angle. But sometimes you need to move to other viewport to move it easier.

You can also click the grip to select it and move it like you move any other AutoCAD object.

Feel free to place the camera and target. Choose the place you feel the best for you. You can also change the camera properties by changing the coordinate in properties palette. Try to change the roll angle and have fun!

Now after you have done, you can select the camera, right click, and choose set camera view from contextual menu. Your viewport is now showing your camera view.

Now change the visual styles to shading, hidden lines, or anything that will show the solid form. We need to do this to check if the camera is showing the model correctly.

Do you confused when you need to set up your rendering materials? How much you should set the opacity value, shininess, and the other values? Don’t be. AutoCAD (and other rendering software) has a template that define standard materials. All you need to do is select the type and template.

In this example, I use Realistic type, and Ceramic Tile, Glazed as template. After I chose it, all of my material properties value changes accordingly. It’s the common value for that particular material.

You may have to tweak it a little bit. But mostly it works fine. Every materials in my rendering here, was set using material templates. I didn’t change any properties at all.

This is not just in AutoCAD. I believe every application that renders have similar tool to this.

Rendering with AutoCAD? Why not. It can produce very nice result since 2007. Autodesk change the render engine with mental ray. It’s not exactly the same with mental ray in 3ds Max, but it is good enough.

Every image in this post is created with Revit, and rendered with AutoCAD. Isn’t Revit also has mental ray? Yes, and it’s good too. I created this model in Revit 2008, when Revit still use Accurender. Rendering it in AutoCAD, is a lot better than doing it in Revit before.

Let’s see more of my renderings.

This model below is from the getting started tutorial in Revit. I exported it to DWG, redefine all the materials, and render it. I only use sunlight, no other light is defined. The smooth shadow and indirect lights look very nice.

Let’s take a closer look. See the railing? The stainless steel material look realistic enough to me. The reflection on the door glass look nice too.

This is another one.

It can produce very nice photorealistic rendering. If you don’t have 3ds Max, don’t worry. Render your model with AutoCAD. Why not?

If you want to try it by yourself, you can try setting your sunlight in this tutorial. It is easy and produce quite nice rendering!