About Materials
Using BIM materials you can control the graphical appearance of entities in drawings that you created from the BIM model.
The software provides a Materials Library. Materials from the Materials Library specify graphical styles which the software uses to display BIM entities. Each material specifies the graphical style attributes for a section cut and surface of each BIM entity.
Walls with multiple materials.
Graphical style of each material specifies:
- Hatch properties, such as name, scale, rotation, and lineweight
- Edge and boundary lineweight and color,
- Shading color and transparency
Note: You cannot add, remove, or edit materials available in the BIM Material Library.
When you create or refresh BIM drawings, the material styles defined in the CAD software differentiate a section cut from the surface of each entity showing appropriate graphical representation. For the same material, the surface representation is tipically lighter lineweight than cut representation, and uses a different hatch pattern or has no hatch.
For example, a drawing displays a BIM entity of material concrete using a concrete hatch pattern (AR-CONC) if the drawing’s cutting plane cuts through the BIM entity and no hatch when the same BIM entity is visible but the drawing's cutting plane does not intersect it.
When you load BIM files into the current DWG file, the available materials are loaded as well. For each BIM entity, the Material property in the Properties palette displays the material specified in the BIM file.
The following tools let you display the list of materials from the BIM model entities:
- BIM Material Mapper palette
- BIM Multi Component palette