ARCHICAD - Material Settings

Owned by Systems Next Limit (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 20 Jan, 2021 by Next Limit
4 min read

Our plugin builds into the ARCHICAD Material Settings dialog to provide a consistent workflow for ARCHICAD users.

You can open this dialog from the 3D Visualization palette or from the menu Options > Element Attributes > Material.



There are 2 separate mechanisms for handling materials:

Automatic conversion of native ARCHICAD materials to Maxwell materials

  • Emitter materials are converted to emitters

  • Materials with transparency are converted to transparent materials

  • Materials with shininess are converted to plastic materials

  • Other materials are converted to diffuse materials

  • Textures are supported

Maxwell MXM materials as special parameters of native ARCHICAD materials

It is possible (and advisable) to use Maxwell MXM materials (stored as separate files) with ARCHICAD projects. There is an extensive library of MXM materials distributed with the Maxwell rendering engine or you can easily create your own materials.

Maxwell MXM material parameters are accessible from the Material dialog of ARCHICAD when the Maxwell Rendering Engine is selected as the active rendering engine for material preview. Note that the interactive preview of the Maxwell material is shown in the preview control of the material panel.

Preview

Starts Maxwell material editor (MXED) in wizard mode to create your own material. You are presented with a save file dialog which will allow you to specify the name/location of the MXM file you are about to create – after that MXED is started in wizard mode to guide you through the process of creating a Maxwell material – you may consult Maxwell manual for details on MXED and Maxwell MXM materials.

MXM Material

Load

Opens material browser to select an MXM material to load. Once the file is selected its name is shown in the name control, the path for the file is shown in path control and preview (if available) is updated in the preview control for easy preview of the loaded material.

Edit

Starts MXED in edit mode with the specified MXM material loaded for quick modification of the material.

Reset

Removes MXM material attribute from ARCHICAD material.



Creating materials within ARCHICAD

In addition to Maxwell materials stored as MXM files, it is possible to create simple Maxwell materials directly from ARCHICAD's material panel. This is especially useful when working with light-emitting materials - it is no longer needed to go to the Maxwell material editor (MXED) to create MXM files as the required material can be created in the ARCHICAD dialog directly. Choose one of the 5 material types available:

Diffuse

Diffuse Maxwell material - color/texture of the material is taken from ARCHICAD material specification.

Plastic

Plastic Maxwell material with 2 BSDF layers - - color/texture of the material is taken from ARCHICAD material specification. The roughness parameter controls how shiny/dull the material is - the same as in MXED.

Metal

Metallic material based on the presets for Aluminum, Cobalt, Copper, Gold, Silver. The roughness parameter controls how shiny/dull the material is - the same as in MXED.

Dielectric

Dielectric material - typically any transparent material such as water, glass, etc. Please see the Transmissive Properties properties page in the Maxwell documentation for more details.

  • Nd: index of refraction

  • Distance: attenuation distance in millimeters - half of the light is being absorbed when it passes through the given distance of the material. A smaller attenuation distance means the material will turn opaque faster.

Emitter

Light-emitting material (must be applied to an object which will act as the light source). Please see the Lighting with Emitters page in the Maxwell documentation for more details.

  • Watts: the power of the light

  • Efficiency: the efficiency of the light source (how much power is actually used to emit light).

  • Temperature: the temperature of the emitter (in Kelvins). If the checkbox is off the color of the emitter is taken from ARCHICAD's emission color control

  • Presets: presets for typical emitters from the real world

Material browser

The material browser is used for loading Maxwell MXM materials into the material dialog of ARCHICAD. The Browser allows for quick and easy location of desired materials even you have many MXM files on disk. The Browser view contains individual previews of MXM materials and sub-folders of the specified location. You can enter the sub-folder by double-clicking on it.

WEB Gallery

From the MXM Material Browser you can easily connect to the MXM gallery server and choose from thousands of materials made by other Maxwell users. After you click on the WEB Gallery button the plugin opens the MXM Gallery database. You can read about it more at Resources Browser Panel (see text under Browsing the MXM Gallery (Web tab)).

After you download the desired material file program returns back to the browser window (your new mxm file selected).

Maxwell Grass



Maxwell Grass is handled as material property in the ARCHICAD plugin. It means you can enable the Grass property on the material level, and the plugin translates it automatically to Maxwell Geometry modifier.

For more information on the operation of the actual grass parameters, please consult the standard Maxwell Grass documentation.