Multiple transparency tile - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we'll create a material for a glass and stone blended mosaic wall tile by using images for transparency and bump, resulting in a digital material made out of seemingly different physical materials. Let's get started. Open the 02_09 exercise files. In the project browser, you should see that you're in 3D View 02_09-Tile Mosaic. Here we have a banded wall tile pattern. These gray bands are where we're going to apply our mosaic wall tile accent pattern. Tab to select one of the gray bands. From the properties menu, click edit type. We're going to select to edit the structure to add a material to this wall type. Under structure, where it says by category, click the three dots. For the material browser, we're going to click to create a new material. Right click and rename your new material Mosaic Tile. From the appearance tab, we're going to add the properties we need to make this tile wall pattern. Under the generic tab, select an image. Browse to the chapter two exercise files and select the 02_09_BaseImage. Click open. Click on the picture of the image. In the texture editor, we can see that Revit reads this image as one foot by one foot. The tiles we're using are six inches by one inch. We have eight tiles vertically and two tiles wide, so really, this image should be one foot by eight inches. We're going to adjust the scale in the properties by unlinking the height and width. Type eight inches for the height and click done. I'm going to change our render preview to be a vase to see more of our rendered material. Now I need to add transparency and bump to add more realisticness to our material. If I scroll down to the transparency section, I can check box to apply transparency to our material. I'm going to increase the amount, up to 80%. Looking at our render preview, you can see that most of our material is transparent. However, because this material is made out of glass, tile, and stone, we want to make only portions of it be transparent. I'm going to pull up a quick slide to show. Here we have a slide comparing the image that we used as our base material, and the image we're going to use as our transparency material. The areas that are black will end up being opaque, and the areas that are gray will be a gradient of transparency. The tiles in this pattern have varying levels of transparency, so that's why the variation in darkness and lightness of the colors. Back in Revit, I can choose that image. Pick the 02_09_TransparencyImage from the chapter two exercise file folder, and click open. The texture editor pops up, and this image is being read as one foot by one foot. We'll adjust the scale to match our base image by unlinking the height and width, and adjusting our height to be eight inches tall. Click done. In our preview, where the glass tiles are, you can see through, and where the stone tiles would be you cannot. This is what we're hoping to achieve by using an image to apply transparency to only portions of our material. Scroll down further in the properties, and checkbox bump. This file selection menu will pop up. Choose the 02_09_bump file from the chapter two exercise folder. Click open. Again, Revit is reading this as one foot by one foot. We scroll down to scale and unlink the height and width. We can change the height to be eight inches, matching our other images. Click done. Now we need to adjust the amount of bump. This still looks fairly flat. If I scroll down, I'm going to turn the bump up to 1000. Now looking at our preview, we can see more bumps and variations in the surface pattern of our material. I click okay, and click okay again, and click one final time to exit the type properties. I've now created our material and applied it to the band of our tile wall pattern. We have learned a simple way to make a complicated material. The ability to apply a property to only a portion of that material through an image provides the ability to create a rendered appearance for most materials we would ever need to display. When you look at materials, try to look at them through the lens of the material render properties. If you break the material down into steps for each property, you'll easily be able to create the materials you need for realistic visualization graphics.