How do I get Materials to Show?

[Brandon]

Hello Everyone,

I was just modeling something and playing around with the materials property, however every time I select a material, the model stays at the default color and texture. It doesn't change. Maybe I am doing something wrong, as I am still relatively new to Alibre.

Material: Birch


Material: Caron-Carbon Composite


Thank you for your time.

 

[simonb65]

Materials in Alibre define it's mass/density, nothing more! It's also used on BOM's. It's a mechanical CAD program, not a renderer. For rendering, export your model to an appropriate file format and import into something like KeyShort or similar, then apply the textures to your model and render.

 

[Brandon]

Materials in Alibre define it's mass/density, nothing more!

Oh, okay. In the future, will that change?

 

[simonb65]

In the future, will that change?

Hopefully. In the last 10 years we have had the ability to colour faces and see thread textures ... so, maybe not anytime soon!

 

[Ex Machina]

Actually what Brandon is saying is a feature that's becoming more and more common in today's CAD systems. I know for sure that Fusion 360, Solidworks and Solid Edge have it. Alibre follows the more old school and hard-logic approach "If you want to render it, use Keyshot. If you want to document it, the material comes in the drawing as a property"

I guess there is the benefit of being able to tell the material at a glance in an assembly. And also, we all like the model to look cool as we're designing. Maybe we'll get a feature like that in the future. Alibre is light enough as a software compared to its design performance that I think it can afford to take a little hit for a feature like that.

But I also agree, that it is not and should not be a priority for now.

 

[simonb65]

I did raise a comment on why the newish material dialog didn't just allow an associated colour assignment in a post last year ...

https://www.alibre.com/forum/index.php?threads/save-store-custom-colors.23323/post-155857

... as even being able to set a model to a specific colour when assigning a material would have been a step in the right direction. But that, like other suggestions to add 'polish' to new features, just seems to get overlooked sometimes.

 

[HaroldL]

Just my $.02 on the subject. As you add more to the model for graphics realism it will require more resources that may not be available on your computer. That would be nice but you have to weight the benefit.

 

[NateLiquidGravity]

I've had an idea for a while on this but no time to do anything on it: An add-on has access to insert into or replace Alibre Design's graphics and access to the tessellated mesh and the material assigned to parts. In theory someone could jam Unreal Engine in there and it would be beautiful.

 

[NateLiquidGravity]

I fired up a texture test addon I was doing years ago built on the DXSampleAddOn found here:

Add-On Documentation and Samples

This section will provide you detailed information regarding creating Add-Ons for Alibre Design, various Add-On samples to get you started and programmatic guidelines for creating these add-ons.

www.alibre.com

It still works in v27!

 

[MilesH]

I did raise a comment on why the newish material dialog didn't just allow an associated colour assignment in a post last year ...

The ability to automatically assign a colour, opacity and reflectivity to a material would be useful for easily distinguishing between parts. Personally, I hate the basic render-lite effects like Ambient Occlusion, Ground Shadow, Model Shadow and Ground Reflection, though. I turned them all off...

 

[Ex Machina]

Just my $.02 on the subject. As you add more to the model for graphics realism it will require more resources that may not be available on your computer. That would be nice but you have to weight the benefit.

That is very true, but you could implement it like the Ambient Occlusion, Model Shadows, etc. I.e. with a toggle button. And you could even make it unavailable if the GPU has less than 3 or 4GB of VRAM. That way the user would be able to select whether the hit in performance is worth it for them. And really, we're not talking about real, ray traced rendering, just something that will give the user a visual cue.

The ability to automatically assign a colour, opacity and reflectivity to a material would be useful for easily distinguishing between parts. Personally, I hate the basic render-lite effects like Ambient Occlusion, Ground Shadow, Model Shadow and Ground Reflection, though. I turned them all off...

I love them. I have everything on, all the time!

 

[HaroldL]

The ability to automatically assign a colour, opacity and reflectivity to a material would be useful for easily distinguishing between parts. Personally, I hate the basic render-lite effects like Ambient Occlusion, Ground Shadow, Model Shadow and Ground Reflection, though. I turned them all off...

I also turned off AO, shadows and reflections. They may be okay if you need them for a screen shot graphic but for actual modeling work and 'getting the job done' I find them an annoyance. And now with the issues I am having with Alibre occasionally freezing up on me I don't need something taking up more graphics resources.

 

[bolsover]

Certainly not a priority for me - but it would be nice if materials had a default colour property.

 

[VoltsAndBolts]

I did raise a comment on why the newish material dialog didn't just allow an associated colour assignment in a post last year ...

https://www.alibre.com/forum/index.php?threads/save-store-custom-colors.23323/post-155857

... as even being able to set a model to a specific colour when assigning a material would have been a step in the right direction. But that, like other suggestions to add 'polish' to new features, just seems to get overlooked sometimes.

That really is a great idea. I would certainly use it, selecting colors or shades of color to represent the materials I use most often. I would so dig it!!!