Hello!
What’s the best way to put different materials on some faces of a wall? It’s clear how the whole wall’s material is set up (in the styles dialog), but for specific faces, I don’t see a better way than creating a separate normal surface with a small gap and put the material on in.
Thanks!
Best regards
Eugen
Hi @Eugen, from the wall styles dialog you can also assign different materials to each one of the wall layers.
That means that you will need to create a different wall style for wall that has different material on one of their exterior faces. Or, you can assign a material to the layer of a wall style, and leave the exterior one to “By Parent”. Then you can assign the material directly to the wall object, and only the layer with the material “By Parent” will get it. This way you can have two walls with the same style with different materials.
Of course! Thanks Francesc!
However, then I’d like to make that (paint) layer really thin, like < 1mm, and the wall styles dialog has this rounding problem:
I need to work in meters (office standard), and 1mm is truncated.
That was the situation:
Hi @Eugen,
You can create a 0.0 thickness wall layer, which will create a surface instead of a solid. The only downside is that, in some situations and renders, Z-fighting artifacts may appear.
Enric
Interesting. Leads to the thought: how about introducing offset params for the wall layers?
Would this make sense? Air layers and such…
Z-fighting is what would happen with my workaround (placing a plane on top) too, without a tiny offset, of course. Ugly tough because those little offsets make the snapping messy.
Or, would it be possible to add a function to directly select wall/object faces and change their material? Revit has this paint tool thing for that.
VisualARQ is already applying some dynamic offset to those 0 thickness layers to reduce Z-fighting. I think it works fine for planar walls. Have you tried it?
You can make offset by making a wall layer “Hidden” in the attributes.
We’re aware of Revit’s paint feature, and this is something we will implement sooner or later.
Regards,
Enric
Thanks for the tip! I tested that zero thickness layer trick, and it works. Indeed there’s a tiny gap between the layers.
Is it just me looking not enough tutorial videos, or did you not advertise that feature enough? ;}
Best regards
Eugen
Well, this feature was added one year ago, in VisualARQ 2.6, as it was requested by some users, but we didn’t announce it as a new feature, as it is incomplete:
- Some Z-fighting may appear on curved walls.
- Dynamic offset works fine for static renders, but not for real-time renders.
- You cannot assign different materials to each object, so the material must be still applied by style.
Enric