Material Editor

[mark_kauffman]

Materials in Infraworks are limited to the diffuse bitmap and material grouping. This is too limiting. I therefore suggest the inclusion of a material editor, which would provide the user a greater level of control over the material attributes applied to geometry.

Utilizing the existing Autodesk Material model, specifically the Generic materials, the user should have control over the Diffuse (Generic), Reflectivity, Transparency, and other channels (see below).

Some of these would not necessarily translate to viewport shading, but would be supported in the rendering phase (see post on Rendering).

What is most important about this feature is that gives the user control over the material attributes of an element in InfraWorks and provide the follow benefits:

1. Material changes/embellishments – First and foremost, the IW user can make changes to the materials and add additional embellishments. Remove the glossy/reflective attribute from a rough surface, or add a bumpiness. Make a surface semitransparent or self-illuminated such as a light. Remove a texture and set a simple color. Often, importing 3D model can result in the loss of a material attribute (reflectively attribute looks wrong in viewport or too strong in render) and having control allows the IW user to address these problems.
2. Missing textures – Often, the 3D model was created and exported without the associate textures. For instance, the custom brick material used in the Revit model is missing. The IW user can request the bitmap from the Revit user, open the Material Editor and add it to the Diffuse channel.
3. 3rd party Application missing– No longer does the user need to go back to the progenitor application to make material changes. Not only does this save time, but it helps the process when the user does not have access to the application that created the original 3D asset (3D model created in Sketchup and the user only has Infraworks).
4. Level of Detail Control – Adding material editing allows the user to control level of detail where necessary to mitigate performance issues or aesthetics. For instance, the user might adjust the material of the contextual buildings to be muted compared to project area features buildings. This would be of particular usefulness when using proposals.

[mark_kauffman]

It occurred to me that the new Physical Material shipping with 3ds max 2017 would be a better approach to materials compared to the Autodesk Material. The Physical Material is a Physically Based Render (PBR - no not that PBR hipsters) and is designed to work very well with the Autodesk Ray Tracer (ART). Perhaps the dev team can nudge the Autodesk Material team in that direction 😉