2010

NOTE If the Presenter profile in the Options Editor (see “Presenter Page” on page 405 for more information) is set to
Advanced, there are more tabs and parameters to edit in this dialog box. In particular, there are Reflectance,
Transparency, Displacement, and 2D Texture Space tabs and at the top of each tab is a Shader type which allows you
to completely change the type of material and all other parameters.
To edit the breeze block texture
1 Open the Presenter window, and click the Materials tab.
2 Double-click breeze block in the palette to open the Material Editor.
3 The three buttons at the top determine what sort of material preview you get:
■ Click the Standard Preview button
to get a software generated photorealistic preview of the material
on the standard ball against checkered background, which is not interactive but will show how the
material will look when rendered photorealistically.
■ Click the Active Preview button
to get an OpenGL interactive preview of the material on the standard
ball against checkered background. This is updated interactively while you change the parameters and
will resemble the quality of material shown in Autodesk Navisworks during navigation, but will not be
as high a quality as the photorealistic render.
■ Click the Main Window Preview button
to close the preview window in the material editor and
instead preview the material on the item in the scene in the Scene Area. This is updated interactively
while you change the parameters and will be exactly the material shown in Autodesk Navisworks during
navigation, but will not be as high a quality as the photorealistic render.
4 For a simple material, there is only a single Material tab on the Material Editor, whereas for a texture material,
whether procedural (generated from an algorithm) or bitmap (generated from an image), there is an extra
tab called Texture.
■ The Material tab contains simple parameters that affect the material's color, scale, shininess and so on.
In the case of the breeze block, there are parameters for the overall scale of the material as well as a
block's width and height, the blocks' color and mortar color, its roughness and reflectivity. For bitmap
textures, you need to define the location of the image in the Image File Name box. On a glassy material,
other factors would affect the transparency and refraction properties of the glass. Some of these factors
will not be apparent in the interactive OpenGL window and will have to be rendered with the Render
button to be seen.
Edit Presenter Materials | 307