AREAL3d provides an own palette of materials, which are recognized by the tool in a special way.
It contains greyscale and coloured values of the AREAL-materials, with their opacity and texture, if assigned, in two system files.
It depends on your greyscale/colour-setting, which file is updated or even reset.
Reset twice, if you want to reset both, coloured and greyscale.
(You will find the reset-function in the material section of the main pulldown menue).
If the file is reset because of any kind of error, both scales will be reset!
The files will be reset on programm start, when the files are corrupted somehow or missing.
Materials can be selected from the toolbar, then in the paint-tool-context and from some other context menues (where it seems useful) or picked (in the material tool).
The user can asign a prize-value to every used internal or user material. Those values will be applied in the calculation of the project.
User currency can be defined in general settings.
Materials can be
- reset (skp-menue) to hardcoded values
- saved to a file
- loaded from a file
You can always edit any material with the standard sketchup tool.
The changes will be saved in the material-file and restored for your workflow in the next session (as soon as you select the sketchup workspace again and any tool, the material-files get updated).
Resetting the materials overwrites the material file! It is useful to save useful material palettes in own files (save function).
If you load a material file, all materials registered in the file will be updated in the model without a further confirmation.
You can defined as many material files, as you need or like.
You also can iterate thru those files to find the one, you need (with automatic update of the model, so wysiwyg, if you like.....).
If you delete an AREAL-material in the standard skp-material-menue, it will be reset to standard material on any face, it was assigned (sketchup-function).
In this case use the AREAL restore function to repair all AREAL elements on buildings.
Note:
AREAL3D materials will not be loaded unless you use any AREAL3D-tool.
Renamed AREAL materials will not be recognized by the programm anymore for material reset etc.,
but AREAL will normally recreate this missing material for further objects.
Making a material unique in ARAL3D (>>Selector) means to create a copy of this material and assign this copy to the active element.
This feature is useful for created unique material names for a selected object, if your vis-program (like LUMION for example) uses material names for texture assignment and you do not import it as single object.
Materials on imported AREAL3D-components:
Those materials will not be saved in the material file at the moment.
