Discover how to effectively manage physical and visual materials in Fusion, with a particular focus on creating a realistic lampshade. Learn to apply different physical materials to objects, modify appearance for visual materials, and incorporate texture map controls for enhanced realism.
Key Insights
- The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to change the physical and visual materials of an object in Fusion. For instance, it walks through the process of changing the physical material of a lampshade from pine to ABS plastic.
- Fusion offers a comprehensive library of physical materials that can be used in the simulation workspace. These materials can be directly applied to an object or even to a specific body. The visual materials, on the other hand, do not affect the simulation workspace but contribute greatly to the aesthetics of the model.
- The article highlights the capability of Fusion to provide realistic visuals for materials like wood. By using texture map controls, users can alter the appearance of the textures on different parts of an object, adding a level of realism that is often unachievable in other modeling softwares.
In this video we will look at the physical and visual materials for our lamp. If you will please scroll down, find step 10 materials, and open your file.
Once the file is open, go ahead and hide your data panel, and let's talk about materials in Fusion. Fusion has two types of materials, a physical material and a visual material. If I go to my lampshade and right click properties, we will see that in properties I have things like area, density, mass, and volume, which are defined by the physical material.
Right now our physical material is set to pine, and that is because when we are creating all of our objects, we knew that they were going to be pine. However, our lampshade will clearly not be milled out of pine, it will most likely be 3D printed. We need to change the physical and visual material of our lampshade.
I'll hit okay, and our materials options can be found under the modify tab. I will go modify, physical material, and you will see right away that the cap here has changed to its physical material. In our design we already have pine, stainless steel, steel, and ABS plastic, but Fusion has provided a large library of physical materials that can be used in this simulation workspace and the cam workspace.
So let's go to plastic, find ABS plastic, and drag it directly on top of our lampshade. This will change the physical material for our lampshade. If I open up my lampshade and go to bodies, I can also apply my material directly to a body.
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That's the only physical material I would like to change right now, so I will hit escape to close my physical material dialog box. If there is no visual material override, the physical material will show in your regular modeling workspace. I will close my lampshade component and let's look at visual materials.
Visual materials have no effect on your cam or simulation workspace and are helpful especially if you're looking at using paint or other finishes for your materials. Let's take a closer look at our wood texture on top of our base. We can see that the grain on the top of our base is running in this direction, on the sides it's vertical, and on the filleted corners it's wrapping around.
This is traditionally how most 3D softwares have represented a wood material. It does not look at all realistic. Fusion has introduced much better solid wood textures in visual materials, so I will do a zoom extends and go to modify appearance.
The appearance affects the visual materials. We can see in our model we have many different materials, but I will go down to wood solid and open that folder. I will go to unfinished and scroll down and find 3D pine unfinished.
I will go ahead and hit download and Fusion will automatically download that material. Most of the appearance materials are not downloaded in Fusion. This is because Fusion wants to keep your program light and does not want to burden your computer with many extra features that you do not need or use.
If Fusion is currently updating when you try to download a material, your material will not download and you may need to restart Fusion. I will drag this into my InDesign window and it will appear here. I can also drag it directly onto a body as long as my bodies and components is selected, or if I change this to faces, I can apply something like paint directly to a face.
I will undo that and again go modify appearance. Another great option in Fusion is overriding entire materials. I do not want to go through and apply this to the individual bodies for all of my arms and the base.
Instead, I can drag directly from this solid material on top of my pine material and it will replace all of those materials in my project. You may get a warning that says the old material could not be removed and that is because pine is our current default material. That's okay.
Go ahead and hit close. I will close my appearance and now as I zoom in on my 3D texture, we can see that this looks like it was cut out of a piece of wood. We have our end grain and our long grain and that is reflected even when cutting with fillets.
However, if we look around, all of our pieces of wood seem to be cut directly out of the center of a tree. This is not realistic and we can change our texture appearance. If with nothing selected, we right click on one of our faces, we can see texture map controls.
I can now move and rotate my texture so that it looks like it was cut out of a different part of the tree. Without closing, I can select a different face on a different body or component and move the texture on that body and component. I can continue clicking and moving my textures on my different bodies and components to make it appear as though they were all cut from different parts of the same tree.
This adds a level of realism to your model that cannot be achieved in other modeling softwares. Now as I zoom in and orbit around, you will see all of my pieces of wood have a three-dimensional texture applied and all of those textures are unique. Go ahead and save your model and in the next video we will talk about grouping our timeline to improve our workflow.
I will see you in the next video.
