Objects not showing assigned materials

Jim Canale

Just a couple quick questions.. For the first time in my life, I'm playing with materials. I created a simple wedge and assigned "rosewod" from the library. Easy peasy. Looks like rosewood. Then I opened the materials manager, copied Chrome, renamed it, and increased the reflectance of the new material until it looked like a mirror in the sample. I applied this modified chrome to my wedge, but it looks like a white block! I put a smaller red block in front of it, expecting to see a reflection. But nothing. What did I miss?

Wondering it this stuff is very dependent on lighting. That is another subject I know nothing about. Is there a tutorial on materials and lighting?

Michael Mayer

Did you look at it just in 3D Viewport or did you render it.
OpenGL Display shows no Reflections.

Jim Canale

Mich> @Michael Mayer said:

Did you look at it just in 3D Viewport or did you render it.
OpenGL Display shows no Reflections.

Michael. sorry I didn't see your comment until today. I don't always get notifications of responses. Anyway, am I SUPPOSED to render to see the materials? I haven't tried the materials since last June, and can't recall how I even applied them to the objects.

Michael Mayer

In OpenGL view you can see effects like colour, textures, transparency
and some simple fake highlights from Light Sources.
(depending on settings of your Visual Styles)

To see ray traced Reflections you need to "Render" an image.

In more advanced 3D Viewports of most 3D Apps like Modo or C4D,
you may see some more effects like Screen Space Reflections*,
Ambient Occlusion and such things. Still far from looking realistic.
(* SSR will only reflect what is seen from the camera and neglect
everything what is behind)

So if you are a beginner and just playing and testing with Materials,
start a render to check your results.
If that is something that you get more interested in, for Bricscad V20
you can 30 day trial or subscribe to Enscape Plug-in.

Enscape is a GPU Real Time Renderer that, beside the typical advanced
OpenGL features offers also some Ray tracing on a capable GPU.
So you will see beautiful blurry(!) Reflections, Indirect Light calculation (GI)
and alls that stuff that makes Architecture recognizable, in real or nearly
real time.

The Problem for now, until Enscape Plug-in supports their advanced
Material Editor and Libraries for Bricscad,
is that Bricscad's Materials and Editor is so limited that you can't
adjust serious and important Material properties.
AFAIK Redway Materials are (PBR) (physically based rendering Materials,
containing blurry reflections and such features that appear in
Rendering. But you have no access from Bricscad's Editor to customize
or access them when creating Materials from scratch.

So there is not much control beside naming Materials by an Enscape
Standard (like containing the words Grass, Aluminium, Water, ....)
to make Enscape automatically replace Bricscad simple Materials
with advanced Enscape Materials.

Michael Mayer

and can't recall how I even applied them to the objects.

I always try to apply any kind of Attributes by Layer, as much as possible.
So I set my Materials for each Layer.
Of course you can also apply them by dragNdrop (check Shape Videos)
or Properties Palette on a per object basis.

Also set your Sun and Location in Drawing Explorer,
to get some Daylight and Shadows for your scenes when rendering.