taoist Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 Has anyone explored the depths of this new capability specifically for walls? Is it VW's answer to vertical stacked wall components? I currently use VW 2019 Architect. Video looked good, but not enough information. Taoist Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 Materials do not offer a solution for vertical stacked walls. There's a thread about materials you might want to wade through: As I noted in that thread, I've decided to ignore materials at least until they are fully implemented and better workflows are available. 1 Quote Link to comment
Guest Wes Gardner Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 @taoist, as mentioned above, materials won't help with the stacked components scenario. Also, some objects like doors and windows are not "material-aware" yet. Wes Quote Link to comment
mjm Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 4 hours ago, Wes Gardner said: @taoist, … Also, some objects like doors and windows are not "material-aware" yet. Wes @Wes GardnerWhat does that mean, actually; but first define what it means for an object to be material-aware. thanks vey much Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 Not all objects allow you to assign a material. For instance, an extruded object has a "Use Material" checkbox in the OIP, but other objects (e.g. Doors) do not and there is no way to assign a material to them. 1 Quote Link to comment
mjm Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 14 minutes ago, E|FA said: Not all objects allow you to assign a material. For instance, an extruded object has a "Use Material" checkbox in the OIP, but other objects (e.g. Doors) do not and there is no way to assign a material to them. @E|FAThanks very much. I did do a scan of the website page which describes that. Does not yet sound useful for lighting design, or do I again misunderstand? Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 (edited) I don't know what your needs are for lighting design, but it's not useful for the architectural work I do, so I'm continuing to work without using Materials. Edited December 1, 2020 by E|FA Quote Link to comment
Pat Stanford Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 As it was explained to me, in the current state, Materials were set first for objects that are likely to be "site built" and that having additional data about the area/volume/weight/etc. could provide value. Since the majority of doors/windows are purchased as complete units rather than as an assembly of pieces to be assembled on site, they were left for later. Materials do not have to be an all or nothing item. Using Materials on the components of a wall for instance might prove to be very useful in calculating the area or volume of each material in estimating. The use of materials in a concrete floor in a "second story" garage for a house on a hillside might prove very useful in calculating the weight the structure below has to support. The fact that they can not also be used to apply textures to a door is secondary. I don't know if trusses are Material Aware, but if they are it would provide an additional way to add the weight of the truss to a lighting position. One of the Beta testers believes that materials should be data only and that the attributes and textures have been added actually detract from their usefullness. That is what Classes are for. If Materials don't help your workflow, don't use them, but also keep an eye open for when they may provide value. 4 Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 (edited) 1 hour ago, Pat Stanford said: One of the Beta testers believes that materials should be data only and that the attributes and textures have been added actually detract from their usefullness. That is what Classes are for. Data only materials would be one solution that would resolve my main reason for not using materials - the need to manage Class attributes and Material attributes for items that are made of the same material (in the real world sense) but are in VW objects that accept or don't accept Material definition. For instance, if I have a wall with maple finish panels (wall component defined as a Material) with a matching maple finish door (PIO set by Class) inserted into it, I have to maintain and coordinate the settings in both Classes and Materials. This is not worth the trouble for me. When I first looked into Materials they appeared as a great way of cleaning up the Class structure and minimizing the number of Classes needed. I appreciate that other users have different needs and workflows, though I don't remember seeing a comment on the message boards praising the new Materials. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with a tendency to post questions & complaints rather than compliments. I do think this is a very promising direction for VW, and I would have thought that adding the ability to be Material Aware for ALL objects wouldn't be a huge technical problem. Then again, what do I know? 1 hour ago, Pat Stanford said: Materials were set first for objects that are likely to be "site built" Unfortunately I don't see a followup stage to the "first" one that was explained to you: Edited December 1, 2020 by E|FA 2 Quote Link to comment
Pat Stanford Posted December 2, 2020 Share Posted December 2, 2020 It might have been on the Beta forum, but I am certain that a senior VW person who I respect talked about extending the objects Materials can be applied to. I don't know if that will be far enough for your needs, but it is (I believe) much farther than they are now. Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted December 2, 2020 Share Posted December 2, 2020 Thanks for the followup. I'm OK waiting to see what comes next & when. I had been waiting to decide on whether to incorporate Materials into my 2021 updated templates and have decided not to. If all is well, I'll make the change in 2022. Quote Link to comment
line-weight Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 Looks to me like there's no point in trying to start using "materials" unless they can be applied to any and everything. Until that happens, it's just another organisational thing to try and keep on top of, in parallel with classes. A question: why not allow users to say that attributes of a class are to be determined by a material? This is kind of what I initially imagined this was. I currently use "material classes" and each of these, I have to set up all the graphics attributes and textures manually. What would be really useful, would just to have an option to set all these, in one click or tick box, to follow a "material". Essentially a bunch of settings I can have saved as a resource. But maybe this misunderstands the concept. Quote Link to comment
Tobias Kern Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 Hi, i think also materials is a good start, but enhancements are more than welcome. Materials should have the same features as classes with settings for, linestyles (color, thickness, opacity, ...) and should have the same visibility setup menu like classes and layers have (visible, non visible, grey). atm you can give geometry a surface and a filling, with material, but no linestyle setting and much more important for me, you don't have a visibility control for materials. i would like to do a setup, where i can only show all geometry with some specific materials. … so please a visibility menu in the navigation palette would be handy. there you also can do the setup for the classes. i think it would be better to separate materials form classes, otherwise you can give classes the ability to save also the material setup. … or we need a "tag"-system, where we can do such visibility setups. give a object a "tag" and control the tags in a tag-menu independently from classes and materials. a tag-system would be flexible as hell. greetings tobi 1 Quote Link to comment
line-weight Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 14 minutes ago, Tobias Kern said: … or we need a "tag"-system, where we can do such visibility setups. give a object a "tag" and control the tags in a tag-menu independently from classes and materials. a tag-system would be flexible as hell. agreed. 1 Quote Link to comment
Boh Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 Is anyone using materials to create finishes schedules? I am hoping this is possible. It would be a biggie in terms of bim. As I understand it Materials can have data added which could then be called up in a schedule. This is something that is not currently possible using classes I don’t think. I envision a library of material resources complete with finishes notes embedded into them. Ideally the data can be centrally controlled from the material definition rather than each instance of a material having its own unique editable data. I can also see that using materials could reduce the need for so many classes, especially classes that only exist for showing attributes ( not for visibility control purposes). However how do you manage which objects get which materials? Manually is ok on smaller projects, not easy on bigger projects so I can see that linking materials to classes would seem to be an efficient way to manage them. 1 Quote Link to comment
line-weight Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 13 minutes ago, Boh said: Is anyone using materials to create finishes schedules? There's a fair bit of careful thinking to be done about this I think, in order to come up with a consistent/usable system. For example, is white painted plasterboard the same "material" as blue painted plasterboard or a different one? Or is the plasterboard one material and the paint another? Is sanded varnished pine the same or different material as rough-sawn pine? As far as my current material-class system is concerned, I've chosen to treat these kinds of scenarios as different materials, whereas maybe someone else would choose to have a material class that then somehow had different finishes assigned to it on a per-object basis. 2 Quote Link to comment
Pat Stanford Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 3 hours ago, line-weight said: Looks to me like there's no point in trying to start using "materials" unless they can be applied to any and everything. Until that happens, it's just another organisational thing to try and keep on top of, in parallel with classes. A question: why not allow users to say that attributes of a class are to be determined by a material? This is kind of what I initially imagined this was. I currently use "material classes" and each of these, I have to set up all the graphics attributes and textures manually. What would be really useful, would just to have an option to set all these, in one click or tick box, to follow a "material". Essentially a bunch of settings I can have saved as a resource. But maybe this misunderstands the concept. As it was explained to me, the attributes of materials is secondary to the data that is contained within the Material. While it would be nice to have the material properties induced in all objects, the first object to get these options were the general tools used for "site built" object so you can extract volume, area, mass, etc. from what you are building. Since most doors/windows come to the site a pre-built units with the "user" having little choice of the materials or dimensions of subcomponents (other than to choose a different model or manufacturer), it was decided that having materials apply to all of the subcomponents of PIOs would be delayed from the original release. So while I understand the comment about "No point until it can be applied to everything", there is a lot of value that can be gained from materials in their current state. Especially the ability to do "compound" (I think that is the term) materials that can be controlled by the percentage of different materials added. Like a concrete slab that you could specify as 50% concrete, 49% gravel, and 1% rebar and get the mass required. As with most things in VW, it may not be for you. Or it may be the best thing since sliced bread. 2 Quote Link to comment
line-weight Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 I can see how it might be useful for these purposes (calculating volume etc). If it were simply the case that it was an attribute that is assigned to an object to define what it's made of, that all makes sense. Because the 'materials' concept seems to be presented/promoted with the ability to have things like textures, hatches and so on associated with them, that misleads users to think that they are intended to be used as the primary way to determine the appearance of objects in sections, renderings, and so on. But they can't really be used like that, because you'll need some parallel classing system to cover all the elements that can't use 'materials'. 2 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post Ben Beaumont Posted February 25, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post Share Posted February 25, 2021 We have constructed localised libraries of 100's, (pushing 1000's) of Materials. @Julian Carr has written a script to create Materials from Textures which helped enormously. There is also a Worksheet that can push other material values into Material Styles. This is a boon for building libraries with repetitive information. We have updated our Wall and Slab styles such that the external and internal components (only) use Materials. Typically the external face is textured with an associated surface hatch (eg; painted weatherboard) so the component has a discernable thickness. The weatherboard Material library has any given profile in multiple popular colours. There are around 5 common weatherboard profiles and 100+ popular exterior colours. I don't think we can reasonably use Classes to manage the attributes of 500+ weatherboard options alone. We have constructed an 'Applied Finishes' Materials library with about 150 popular and fashionable paint colours from a leading paint supplier. The Wall styles have a 0.1mm internal Component for the 'Applied finish'. The slab styles (for ceilings) have the same. The Wall Styles in our libraries have 'Natural White' associated with them, the ceilings have 'Ceiling White' associated with them. The Attributes of the other Wall and Slab components are still 'by Class'. We have a short list of (legacy?) Component Classes to control these attributes. It is a pleasure to use the Wall and Slab Styles straight from the library and to be able to simply swap out the Material with a preferred option (also straight from the library). I hear the comments about the absence of Class override type control for Materials, but for me the flatter workflow of simply applying a Material to an object is a far lesser evil than trying to do it with Classes. Considering the ease with which a model can be 'painted' in some other platforms, Materials are a welcome development. 6 Quote Link to comment
Boh Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 @Ben Beaumont What techniques / workflow are you using to call up the finishes in your documentation? Are you using data tags and/or worksheets? How do you accomodate finishes that can’t be / aren’t yet covered by materials? Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted February 25, 2021 Share Posted February 25, 2021 @Ben Beaumont Thanks for the extensive description of your workflow. Sounds like there are more and more reasons to consider moving to Australia. Can you explain how you deal with model/drawing elements for which Materials can't be assigned? I'd appreciate your posting an explanation to my questions in this other thread: If it seems like a better way to convey the information, I can transfer my previous comment to this thread Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee Ben Beaumont Posted February 26, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted February 26, 2021 2 hours ago, Boh said: @Ben Beaumont What techniques / workflow are you using to call up the finishes in your documentation? Are you using data tags and/or worksheets? How do you accomodate finishes that can’t be / aren’t yet covered by materials? Boh, Yes, I would imagine we would be looking to use data tags and worksheets...this is - as yet - untested. It's business as usual for all other objects that don't yet use materials. 1 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee Ben Beaumont Posted February 26, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted February 26, 2021 2 hours ago, E|FA said: @Ben Beaumont Thanks for the extensive description of your workflow. Sounds like there are more and more reasons to consider moving to Australia. Can you explain how you deal with model/drawing elements for which Materials can't be assigned? I'd appreciate your posting an explanation to my questions in this other thread: If it seems like a better way to convey the information, I can transfer my previous comment to this thread It seems a Material carries all the metadata that otherwise might not have a home. So it sets a project up to be measured. The fact it can also have a Texture (and by proxy a Surface Hatch) is a nice to have and - it seems - a convenient way to help visualise a project. 2 Quote Link to comment
line-weight Posted February 26, 2021 Share Posted February 26, 2021 I currently use a "material class" to control the fill and the section-plane lineweight of any object when it appears in a non-merged section. The object's fill and lineweight are set to be "by class". It seems that if I give that object a material, then its fill in section is controlled by its material, rather than its class attributes. Is that right? But its lineweight in section is still controlled by class attributes. Is that right? So, let's say that I want to change that object to a different material, one that I want to show with a different fill and different lineweight in section. I have to go to the object, and change its material, and also change its class. Is that correct? So it seems that if I want to have control over lineweight and fill in section, every object has to have a material and also a "material class" or at least a "lineweight class". Quote Link to comment
Tobias Kern Posted February 26, 2021 Share Posted February 26, 2021 … that is why i want to control the lineweight, linestyle, opacity, ... in the material directly. i think it makes more sense. … and additionally: the visibility control (visible, non visible, grey) for materials! 1 Quote Link to comment
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