Materials control the display of elements in views and rendered images and are useful for a variety of tasks including structural and energy analysis.

The picture below shows different materials for a ball: bricks, pavers, aluminium and brass.

Material properties are divided into these categories:

• Appearance properties — Used to control the display of elements in the views with 'Realistic' and 'Ray Trace' rendering modes.
• Graphical properties — Used to control the display of elements in views with other rendering modes.
• Physical properties — Used for structural analysis.
• Thermal properties — Used for energy analysis.

Use the following classes to work with materials and their properties:

• OdBmMaterialElem class — Material element, which describes an element in the database that holds the material object.
• OdBmMaterial class — Material object, which stores information about the material, color, texture and other data used for rendering the material.
• OdBmMaterialTracking class — Material tracking manager.
• OdBmAppearanceAssetElem class — Appearance asset element, which describes an element in the database that holds the appearance asset data.
• OdBmAppearanceAsset class — Appearance asset object, which stores data of the appearance asset.
• OdBmAppearanceAssetHelper class — Helper class for an appearance asset, which is used to simplify access to properties in assets.
• OdBmAppearanceAssetTracking class — Appearance asset tracking manager.
• OdBmUnifiedBitmapSchemaHelper class — Helper class used to simplify access to material texture data, which is a part of an appearance asset.
• OdBmPhysicalParamSetElem class — Element that holds an OdBmPhysicalParamSet object.
• OdBmPhysicalParamSet class — Object that contains data for physical, structural and energy analysis of a material.
• OdBmPhysicalAssetHelper class — Helper class to simplify access to material physical data.
• OdBmStructuralAssetHelper class — Helper class to simplify access to material structural data.
• OdBmThermalAssetHelper class — Used for implementing energy analysis.

The hierarchy of the material classes is shown below:

See Also

Work with Materials