Applying and Creating Materials - Mastering Lumion 3D - page 80

Some of the other materials will be covered in the following section when we start
to create our own materials. You also can recognize the Landscape material that was
covered in the The Landscape material section in Chapter 2 , Creating a Project in Lumion .
Just a quick reminder for this material: the Landscape material is a great material
that can be easily assigned to a 3D terrain that then blends with the rest of the terrain.
This material is so powerful that it lets you change the textures or even paint textures
on the imported 3D terrain.
Working with the Glass material
One of the initial materials we assigned to a 3D model was the Glass material. Glass
is an important part of modern architecture, and we can see this in buildings such as
the Louvre Pyramid, the Farnsworth House, the Glass Houseboat, and the National
Grand Theater of China, just to mention a few.
By now, you would have added this material to some surfaces of your 3D model,
and as you can see, the result is good, but it could be a little better. There are several
ways to improve this material. We will see one of them later in Chapter 6 , Lighting
in Lumion , where we will use the Reflection cube, and a second (more realistic) way
in Chapter 7 , Creating Realistic Visualizations . It is natural that we would want to
improve the look of the glass, but for now, let's focus our attention on adding just the
materials. Feel free, however, to jump to these chapters and tweak the Glass material.
Although the following material has little to do with believable and stunning
materials, we may find it useful in later stages of production.
Hiding geometry with the Invisible material
The Invisible material can be found next to the Glass button and when we are
assigning this material, the entire surface disappears and this surface will not be
used to calculate global illumination and shadows. This is, in fact, really useful when
there is a need to hide a section of the 3D model.
It is true that the best course of action is to open the 3D model, perform the necessary
changes, and then re-import the 3D model in Lumion. However, if we need to
remove something small, the Invisible material can easily lend a hand, and in
Chapter 5 , Creating Your 3D World , we will see a practical example.
Another situation in which we may find this material useful is when we are creating
a camera angle and we intersect it with the geometry. This can be really annoying
even if we use a super slow camera to accurately place it. Again, the Invisible
material can be used to hide some walls, but we still need to go back to the 3D
modeling package to create a specific material for that wall or other section and
re-import the 3D model in Lumion.