The “Generic” material type is suited for any materials that aren’t supposed to be rendered as grass blades, water surface, or have translucency applied.

It gives you control over the color, reflectivity, transparency, surface relief (height) and light emission of your material.

This is the default material type and can be used for the majority of all possible materials.

The Albedo area controls the basic color of the surface you’re designing. You can either select a color, or choose a texture by clicking the [+] symbol. If choosing a texture, you’ll also receive a “Tint Color” menu, allowing you to easily change the color of the texture used. Control the amount of influence on your texture using the “Image Fade” slider. Of course, Enscape will use any UV information (texture placement) it gets from Vectorworks.

It is also possible to add a video texture to the Albedo texture slot. The following formats are currently supported: .mp4, .mpg, .m2v, .3gp, .avi, .mov, and .mk,
When selecting a video file as the Albedo texture, transparency-related material settings become limited to Cutout-Transparency allowing for the application of a mask texture. The adjustment or inversion of the brightness of the video texture in the Enscape Texture Editor becomes unavailable in this scenario.

The Transparency area lets you control the opacity of your model, or, in other words, the amount of light that can travel through the surface, allowing you to see what’s behind it.

• Texture
  The Texture parameter allows you to control the transparency using a 2D image, a map. It refers to the Opacity value, so a black area (which equals zero) on the image used will result in a perfectly transparent portion of the surface, while a white area will appear perfectly opaque. Grey areas will appear partially transparent, such as glass. If you load a colored image, Enscape will automatically convert it to black and white, so you don’t have to worry about that.
• Opacity
  The Opacity slider controls the overall transparency of the surface. If you’re using it combined with a transparency map, it will define the maximum opacity, so white areas on said map will appear as opaque as you’ve set using this slider.
• Tint Color
  This menu allows you to choose a color that should be added to any semi-transparent areas of your material. Very much like colored glass.
• Refractive Index
  The Refractive Index slider determines by which factor light is being bent when traveling through a transparent surface. You know this effect from looking at a glass of water, or very thick glass.
  Air has a refractive index of 1.0 – so light rays travel through it in a straight line -, water has an index of 1.33, window glass 1.52, and, for example diamonds have an index of 2.42 – they bend light quite heavily.
  For further information on this topic, feel free to have a look at the Wikipedia article .
• Frosted Glass
  If the Frosted Glass checkbox is enabled, Enscape will blur what’s visible through the transparent surface. The amount by which it’s blurred is being determined by the Roughness value in the Reflections area.

The Height option in the Enscape Material Editor allows you to utilize so called Bump, Normal, or Displacement maps in order to simulate bumps, wrinkles and dents and the lighting of these.

Bump maps can be any black and white 2D images. They tell Enscape to interpret a surface as protruding (bright parts of the texture) or recessed (dark parts of the texture).

Normal map are a type of Bump map that require an image with RGB values. These RGB components correspond to the X, Y, and Z coordinates, respectively.

Displacement maps are an enhancement of the bump mapping or normal mapping techniques applied to textures. Normally an Occlusion Map is the type of image you will use for Displacement maps. The actual technique employed in Enscape is called quadtree parallax displacement mapping for optimum performance. It’s worth noting that Displacement maps are incompatible with transparent materials so the entire “Transparency” section becomes unavailable where a displacement map has been applied (including mask textures). Furthermore, the brightness of Displacement maps cannot be further adjusted or inverted when editing the texture inside the Enscape Material Editor itself.

Height maps are incredibly valuable for realism in your images and this can not be overstated enough!

Height maps can make for incredible surface detail and noise, without actually affecting or adding more geometry. You can use this feature for noise on concrete surfaces, wood, tiling, or even full reliefs! This can go a long way in convincing the viewer that they are looking at a realistic picture.

Textures that are available online, either paid for or free, will generally have a Normal, Bump / Height, Occlusion map included or available additionally to the basic Color texture.

It is also worth noting that normal based self-shadowing of material surfaces implemented. This feature further improves the depth perception of materials, especially with displacement maps. It’s active for sun light only when the Rendering Quality level is set to “High”. On Rendering Quality level “Ultra” artificial lights will also cast normal based shadows.

As powerful as this feature is, it’s very easy to setup. Just select an image file using the – button. A Bump map doesn’t even have to be black & white, as Enscape will take care of that for you.

Normal Maps must have an RGB value in them.

As already mentioned, Displacement maps would be best served with an occlusion map if available.

You can switch between using a Bump, Normal, and Displacement map via the Type drop down option.

Select the Intensity (Bump and Displacement) or Amount (Normal) of the effect, using the respectively named slider. Negative values for bump maps. will invert the effect, causing dark areas to stick out and bright areas to be pushed in.

Displacement Maps will only adjust the amount, whether negative or positive values, in the same single direction from the minimum height value.

This area is all about the microscopic roughness of your material, determining how much of the environment you’ll see reflected in its surface.

The Grass type material, as seen in the material editor, looks almost the same as the Generic type. While it’s lacking the Transparency part, it instead features a Grass Settings area. Apart from the Albedo area, which you can use to color your grass (also using a texture), the Height– and Reflections parts are only useful if you plan to toggle the Grass Rendering setting on and off (this can be found in the Enscape General Settings -> Performance -> Grass/Carpet Rendering option).

Height
The Height slider will stretch the sprites being used as grass blades, making them appear larger, making for higher grass.

Height Variation
The Height Variation slider adds a random factor to the grass height. This makes for a wilder looking, ragged grass.

The Carpet material acts in the same way as the Grass Material, in that it can be applied to a horizontal surface only, and the Height and Height Variation are controlled in the Enscape Material Editor.

The Height and Height Variation Settings title is amended with Carpet when Carpet is selected as the Type in the Material Editor.

Here are the available settings for Water in the Enscape Material Editor.

• Water Color
  Choose a color your water should be tinted in. No textures to be used this time – water color is set globally.

The Self Illumination setting, when enabled, tells Enscape to literally handle your material as if it is glowing and emitting actual light. You can choose a brightness between 1 and 100000 candela per square meter (cd/m²), as well as the color of the light.

A simple example of this is to show the difference between the same material with and without the keyword ‘Aluminium’ in it’s name.

What follows are some examples of the implementation of some of the material keywords mentioned above. These examples will give you an idea as to what you should expect to see when using these keywords.

The Grass keyword has four options, as mentioned above. The following images are what you should expect to see in your project when implementing these keywords.

The water texture will animate when you move around in Enscape and, like grass, has several keyword variations. Like the Grass and Carpet material, water can only be applied to horizontal surfaces.

The different water keywords will give you varying types water. So, for example the ‘Ocean’ keyword will display water with a larger scale of waves.

As mentioned at the top of this article, water movement can be affected by the Wind settings in the Visual Settings dialog under  the Atmosphere tab.  Change the speed and the direction your water is flowing to simulate e.g. a river.

• Intensity
  Control the speed in which the water is flowing.
• Direction Angle
  Control the overall direction water is moving in.

When selecting “Foliage” as the keyword, the difference this material  will cause is only visible on single-face objects. Please make sure the object you apply this material to doesn’t have any depth, and also that the material is applied to both sides of the face.

If these conditions are met, Enscape will apply Translucency to objects this material is applied to. This means that, if the Sun (this doesn’t work when combined with artificial lighting) is located behind said surface, it will be illuminated on both sides. This is common in nature, for example with leaves, which is why this is the most common use case for this type of material.

Selecting the “Clearcoat” keyword will imitate the type of paint that you find on car bodies. So, essentially the Clearcoat is a transparent resin material, and the color is defined via the Color Shader in the Vectorwork’s Edit Texture dialog.

This material, therefore, is shiny and reflective by default, although you do have the option to dial back the reflective properties, as well as add a bump map, which are both achieved once again via the Shaders in the Edit Texture dialog.

One keyword that is not available in Vectorworks is the Emissive keyword. However, there is a workaround to this issue.

By converting the surface into an area light you can achieve the same effect. Simply select the surface that you would like to be emissive and in the Vectorworks’ top menu select Modify -> Convert -> Convert to Area Light.

NOTE: An emissive surface will only be emissive if the surface is in camera view, or if the surface included in the current view. This means that if the surface is off screen, it will have no affect.

When rendering in Enscape, mirrors may initially appear to be black because the material color is set to black. They do actually reflect properly but the black makes it hard to see. Please ensure you set the material color to white in order for the mirror to show up correctly in Enscape.