Materials

Building Tools provides a way for users to quickly add materials to building objects/sections. The material tools are located in a separate panel just below the main tools panel.

The panel becomes active when at least one floor of a building has been created. There are three main sections in this panel. Face Maps Face maps are groups of faces that could have the same material. Face maps provide a quick way to group faces in anticipation of adding materials and textures. Users are free to add/remove face maps with the + and - buttons, add/remove faces from a face map using the Assign and Remove buttons and select/deselect faces that belong to a given face map. UV Mapping The UV mapping section provides quick basic options for whether the addon should perform automatic UV mapping and which method should be used. The cube projection method is recommended for the geometry generated by the addon. Material This section provides the user with options to set the material for the active face map. In the image, clicking on the Assign New Material will create a material and assign it to all faces belonging to the active slabs face map. If the user already has materials, then clicking the larger material icon will provide a dropdown with available materials to choose from.

We will explore the material tools using the example illustrated below.

As seen from the image above, we have a building with common elements like a door, window, and roof. To the left in the material tools panel, we can see the corresponding face maps for the elements of the building e.g walls, roof, door, etc.

If we select the walls face map and click the select button just below, the result is as below.

Building Tools has kept track of which faces belong to a particular element. In this case, the walls face map has a record of all the wall faces for the building. This means users don't have to manually select faces when they want to add materials to particular elements.

Continuing with our example, a user can quickly add a material to the wall faces by using the Assign New Material button while the wall face map is still selected.

Assign New Material will create a new material and link all the faces in the wall face map to it. See for yourself:

If a user has their own materials, e.g linked from a library, clicking on the large material icon just below the Assign New Material button will provide a list of existing materials that the user can assign to the current face map faces.