Visualization
About built-in and 3rd party, classic and real-time rendering solutions, settings, workflows, etc.

Surface Catalog previews - any way to see larger versions?

Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
A recent post had me looking at the contents of the Additional Surface Catalog... and wondering if anyone has any tips for viewing the catalog thumbnails larger - at least double or even larger?

Attached is screenshot of a catalog browsing view for reference. The thumbnails are so ridiculously small, and on spheres, rather than flat surfaces, that it is really impossible to see what they will look like until tediously adding each one to the project so that you can apply it to a surface. I understand the rationale for spheres - to better show specular effects, as is standard in the world of 3D modeling/animation... but in architecture, most of our textures are applied to flat surfaces, or perhaps rounded columns, and very rarely to spheres. So the distortion gives no idea of the actual texture and bump details that are more important I think to our community.

Ideas? Is there a PDF from Graphisoft perhaps with all library surfaces illustrated when applied to walls/slabs perhaps?
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
3 REPLIES 3
Stress Co_
Advisor
I add the library, then view the catalog in "Surface Painter".
Still spheres, but if you set to Large Icons... you can see them a
little better.
Marc Corney, Architect
Red Canoe Architecture, P. A.

Mac OS 10.15.7 (Catalina) //// Mac OS 14.2.1 (Sonoma)
Processor: 3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 //// Apple M2 Max
Memory: 48 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 //// 32 GB
Graphics: Radeon Pro 580X 8GB //// 12C CPU, 30C GPU
ArchiCAD 25 (5010 USA Full) //// ArchiCAD 27 (4030 USA Full)
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
That's at least something! Thanks, Marc!

Unfortunately - beyond seeing spheres for totally planar materials - I see no way to actually browse a catalog with Surface Painter.

You have to know what you're looking for and type in a search term. For me, when the search term is blank, rather than seeing all loaded surfaces, I just see some subset (the ones assigned to attributes perhaps - no idea where this set comes from). But, if I type "brick" than lots of surfaces with the phrase "brick" show up. I don't see any easy way of figuring out how to browse any catalog completely - or if I see something, to know what catalog it came from...??
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Earthworm
Booster
Press <space>, it'll show all materials if i'm correct
ArchiCAD 27 | Intel Xeon W-2225 - 4.10GHz | 32 GB RAM | GeForce RTX 3080 | Windows 10