How to Apply Materials and Environments in Navisworks: A Step-by-Step Guide

Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video we'll be looking at how to apply materials to your model, and how to make environments so that you can later render your model in the Autodesk rendering tool. We'll be using the bim361-complete.nwf model in our lesson 3 folder, and as soon as this model opens we're going to save a copy of it into lesson 4. In a previous video we made some saved viewpoints that had some settings, and we made these to switch quickly between them.

So let's switch to full render mode, and our materials look like they've changed. The materials have always been there, it's just the shaded mode appears differently if we have one render style mode set to shaded rather than full render, and all these materials came from the materials from Revit. Navisworks uses the Autodesk material library, much like Autodesk Showcase, Revit, and AutoCAD all use, and we can change these materials real time using this Autodesk material library.

You'll find that tool under home, in tools, called Autodesk rendering. It's a panel just like every other tool in this program, and this panel used to be called Presenter. If you ever find any help forums that mention Presenter, you'll know that that's the origin of this whole panel.

The rendering panel is divided up into tabs, and we have first a materials tab, a material mapping tab, which allows us to change the way that materials are mapped to objects, a lighting tab, which allows us to place lights within our model, not just the default lights that we're seeing right now, and then we can apply environments which are sort of like backgrounds. They can contain gradients or images, sometimes they actually include lighting effects, but first let's start to look at materials, the first tab. Now say we get close to this wall here, and we don't want it to appear like stucco, we'd rather it appear to be brick.

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Now without having to go all the way back to the Revit file and re-exporting, you can head over to the materials tab, and underneath the Autodesk library, we have a number of types of materials. We'd find brick under masonry, and then here are all the default brick materials that Autodesk has given us. To apply a material, you just drag it onto your object, you'll see it turn blue, and as soon as you drop it, you'll see that material is applied.

You can apply them individually just by dragging, or if you have a whole series of objects that you need to apply things to, for example this curtain wall, if we wanted to apply a dark aluminum to it, then it would only allow us to apply it to one piece at a time if we were to drag it onto the curtain wall mullions. We can also use the selection tree to find the curtain wall mullions that are on the first floor, which are the ones that we want to apply these to, and we can right-click on the material and go to assign to selection, and now that will have been applied to all of our curtain wall mullions. Just to demonstrate a better contrast, I'm going to use the blue, and of course I wouldn't want that, so we can simply go back to the aluminum dark.

Let's look what we can do with the environment as well. So right now we just have the default horizon. If we go to the environments tab, we can change some basic settings in this environment tab, like for example horizon height, we can move up and down, we can change the amount of haze that we'd like to see, the intensity factor of the sky illumination you can change, we can change the way that the sun appears by changing the disk size, the intensity, and the intensity of the disks surrounding the sun, and we can also change the exposure value.

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I'm just going to lighten or darken your environment, not necessarily the model that you're looking at. Environments, you should just consider this to be background settings. You also have the ability to change your sun angle calculator to an actual geographical location, and if we were to pick a more current date, time 10 a.m. In location, and set our latitude to 32 degrees north and 117 degrees west for San Diego, our time zone being Pacific, then we'll see the actual geographical sun angle for any time that we give it.

And that's about all there is to material and environment mapping, and I encourage you to play around with a lot of these settings. A lot of times it takes just toying with a lot of these scales to get something that really matches the kind of rendering that you want to output. In the next couple of videos we'll be talking about how to use lighting and then how to render your model using the photorealistic rendering in Navisworks.

I hope you enjoyed, and I will see you in the next video.

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