How to make ArnXt Materials

One feature in IRender nXt that I have started using recently that has made a very noticeable improvement in the rendering quality is the AR material library. I haven’t done much learning yet, would you be able to send me in the best direction to learn how to create and modify AR materials. Would also be interested in how to find more existing AR materials on the internet; do you know of any good resources?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 22, 2011 at 8:56am

There are two different libraries - the older AR materials libraries, and the new nXt Materials libraries. All the old materials have been converted into new nXt materials. So my reply will refer to the new nXt libraries.

The AR Material library is supplied by McNeel and associates.

It has some nice things in it, like Solid Wood:

Solid wood is very nice for sculptured items. If you are making items, such as furniture, with laminate wood patterns, then SketchUp textures are probably easier to match.

But they can be tricky to make if you want to make new ones. (If you want to try, let us know which type you want to make - solid wood, tiled brick, etc.) The best way to make new, complicated, mateirals, like solid wood is to open an existing one in the editor, try making changes, and watch the sample rendeings in the upper right corner.

The Material Tree in the lower right corner is used to create these complex materials by combining and merging special functions.

Many of the textures are not much better than the ones you make in SketchUp - except that they have highlight and reflection properties already applied. Also, it is tricky in SketchUp to figure out how to save a material after you have applied IRender settings to it for use in other models.

The "easy" answer on how to make nXt materials, is to use the save button on the nXt Material editor. This saves your current material as a .ArMaterial file. If you save it in the same folder as the nXt Materials libraries, or new subfolders, then it should show up when you load nXt materials from the library.

There is a site AccuStudio which was designed for sharing things like textures, related to AccuRender. You might see if they have anything of interest.