Dull Materials

[Lachlan Green]

I'm trying to work out all the bits and pieces of ArchiCAD to try and convice the boss to switch over to it from VectorWorks. However I've hit another snag with the elevation/section tool.

When the 'shade with own material colour' is selected the elevation, the elevation becomes nice and pretty as desired. However all of the material colours are extremely dull and completely off from what they look like in Element Attributes - Materials window. And when the sun shadow is turned on it gets even worse.

For example, a material with surface and emission colour set to pure white, and ambient and diffuse set to 100%, looks pure white all over in the Materials window. However, in a section or elevation it comes out as a mid to light grey.

How can I get these materials to come out brighter and more like the colour I set them?

[Anonymous]

I have to use shaded material color, because of the depth it gives by showing different amount of shade depending on the angle of the wall (or any other modeled content, of course).

But the original poster's problem remains: it is impossible to get a material that looks white with shaded materials! I mean white when it's facing the sun in the best possible angle. It can and should be darker in other angles.

Non-shaded materials allow this, but then the whole building is "flat". The only variation comes from things being or not being in the shadow.

We've modeled a white building, but it comes out all grey in all shadowed elevations no matter how the sun or material properties are adjusted. It would be nice to be able to produce colored facades without taking them through Photoshop and adding brightness.

[Anonymous]

Ville wrote:
We've modeled a white building, but it comes out all grey in all shadowed elevations no matter how the sun or material properties are adjusted.

No elevation needs to be in shadow since you can set the sun in each elevation's settings dialog in the Model Display panel.

[Anonymous]

Matthew wrote:
No elevation needs to be in shadow since you can set the sun in each elevation's settings dialog in the Model Display panel.

Obviously so, but since the building has a more complex shape, some of the surfaces are in different angles than facing directly to the viewpoint.

And no matter what you do, you can't get ANY material in ANY angle to look WHITE, when using shaded material colors and shadows. It's light gray at best.

[Anonymous]

Ville wrote:

Matthew wrote:
No elevation needs to be in shadow since you can set the sun in each elevation's settings dialog in the Model Display panel.

Obviously so, but since the building has a more complex shape, some of the surfaces are in different angles than facing directly to the viewpoint.

And no matter what you do, you can't get ANY material in ANY angle to look WHITE, when using shaded material colors and shadows. It's light gray at best.

So what you are really looking for is a threshold level for shadows. Kind of like curves in Photoshop. I doubt we'll see this anytime soon.