Basic Materials Question

I see in the documentation that I can assign a material to an “object”. What then is an object?

If I have a solid, can I assign a different color to each surface? Or is the entire solid the object?

HI Jim - an object is a top-level object - one that can be directly selected. A plysurface, a mesh, a curve, etc but not a face in a polysurface or mesh.

-Pascal

For rendering then, would you split a solid up into surface to get different colors?

Yes, although a trickier way to do this is to Mesh the object first, Explode and then Join (disjoint is OK for meshes) the parts that are to get the same material - hiding the original surfaces of course. The advantage is that the meshes from a joined set of surfaces will match up exactly along the edges, whereas render meshing separated surfaces may show cracks unless the mesh is very fine (depending on the view etc, but in general)

-Pascal

Yes. Joined objects that make polysurfaces (open or closed) are always on the same layer.
We are looking into making it possible to assign different materials to sub-objects (surfaces within a Joined polysurface), in V6 but I’ve not fooled around with any prototypes yet.

It works.

-Pascal

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