Problem with shaded 3D views, colors, surface patterns

[patricks]

I need to have some color shaded 3D views for preliminary presentation, placed on our standard 24x36 title block. The problem I'm having is if I create a 3D perspective view, then highlight the crop box and try to make the size of the box larger but maintain the same field of view, all my surface colors turn very dark. This is with no shadows in the view. If I turn the wall surface patterns off in the view, the colors show as normal, but then I lose things like my stone wainscot surface pattern, etc.

The main problem is with the EIFS on my walls, which have a Sand surface pattern. At first I had the surface pattern set as Sand - Dense, and in shaded 3D it looked extremely dark (even though the surface color was set to a light tan color). I changed the surface pattern to regular Sand and it got a little better, but it was still darker than it should be, yet even with the 3D view set to a larger size, it did not show the sand surface pattern even when zoomed in close.

So with the view set to a relatively small size, the colors look fine, but there is no Sand surface pattern on my EIFS. If I make the view larger but maintain field of view, the EIFS color turns darker, yet there is still no sand pattern visible. However my stone wainscot surface pattern is visible. Is there something I'm missing here?

[patricks]

Can anyone help? This is looking really bad in Perspective views. Normal 3D views look fine, though.

[aaronrumple]

You're using a drafting pattern for the stucco, right? Since the pattern is related to the size of the drawing, not the building, the pattern gets more dense as the perspective gets larger. So you are getting more black hatch over the color. Zoom in very close and you'll see the black hatch and the stucco color.

You have a couple of options.
1. Turn the hatch off for the stucco material. You'll then have to turn it back on later of course.
2. Use a model pattern that is unaffected by the scale of the perspective.

[patricks]

Problem is, we don't have model pattern versions of the Sand and Wood Finish drafting patterns. Is there any way to convert from one to the other?

[aaronrumple]

The hard way.
Open then in Excel. Do the math on all the values except for angles top enlarge the values. Add the ;%Type=Model to the top and give it a spin.

[patricks]

Shouldn't the fill patterns that come with Revit be on my computer somewhere as .pat files?

[aaronrumple]

They are.
Under:
C:\Program Files\Autodesk Revit Building 9\Data

However, once loaded into a project, the *.pat file is not used. So I just keep my custom pat files with my other stuff and really just use it as a scratch pad for loading new patterns into my project or template.

[patricks]

Thanks for sharing your pattern file. I actually just used the Revit Sand drafting pattern and changed its type to Model and saved a new pattern file and it worked pretty well. But I still need to find a pattern file for that wood finish pattern.

[patricks]

I just exported an elevation to AutoCAD, opened the elevation, and the wood pattern shows up as Custom pattern type, named FP1_24 under the element properties in ADT. Is there any way to get this out to a pattern file?