Hey Mel,
The youtube channel of Archicad has a ton of
short clips explaining in detail small things like you just asked. This one should (I think) tell you excactly how create a new high quality surface for cinerender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnwrhdzTVe8
I notice in your sig that you do interior design, interior rendering can be a bit daunting. I really recommend looking over the cinerender videos, it will probably take you 1-2 hours, but Cinerender is a very advanced renderer with lots of bells and whistles. You can also find sample files (from ArchiCAD 18 ) that show the models they are using in the videos along with render scenes, surfaces set up, etc. These are great for going in to more detail and research than the clips do.
There are some preset scenes in the standard template you can use that set up most settings, but I find that they either have rediculously high render times (at the higher settings) or very poor transparancy / problems with transparant surfaces if you do not tweak the right settings. There is a short explanation about the problem with transparancy on the help center. It is a question that pops up on the forum quite often.
ArchiCAD also comes with 250 cinerender surfaces pre-installed, but not all 250 are typically in your project. You can create new surfaces based on this library. Depending on your subscription you may have another 250 surfaces in an extra library.
Some of these surfaces might be close enough to what you are looking for and will have all the advanced settings set up to make them look great in renders. Sometimes even a small colour tweak is all that is needed to make use of some of these surfaces, because a lot of them use procedural shaders rather than textures, so it is a matter of getting in the proper settings and changing some colours, it might not look good in the OpenGL 3D window, but the render will look fine.
If it were a matter of going in to one settings dialogue and typing a few things, I would've supplied a screenshot below (as is done by other people on this forum too), but for your question it is quicker to watch one of the vids about how to set up textures.
If watching video's isn't your thing, I linked the help center, which has pretty much the same thing in written form.
The reference guide that is included from the help menu in ArchiCAD itself is also very thorough and good for looking up stuff in general, it is basically how I learned ArchiCAD, as I wrote above (it just takes a long time to look up everything). It is a PDF and has an excellent index at the back that sends you to the right pages as it does indeed run into a few thousand pages.
I still use it from time to time, for things I don't use very often.
Do not pass up on this forum as it is an excellent source for information, but also remember that it is a user forum and I would say if you really are in need of a quick answer, your resellers helpdesk (assuming they offer one) and the available help center will help you out faster to make crazy deadlines.
Erwin Edel, Project Lead, Leloup Architecten
www.leloup.nlArchiCAD 9-26NED FULL
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