Material

Overview

Material specification is a large part of your model with every individual piece having the ability to select its own material. If a part does not define a material to use, it inherits the material from its parent.

CabinetSense employs a mapping mechanism to allow you to quickly switch both model colors and shop material. Your components use a generic term to define the type of material to use (carcass, construction, glass, metal...) and CabinetSense puts the responsibility of color, texture and shop material definition on the material palette component. Switching material palettes is easy to do by using the Change Palette function. You can have multiple palettes in the same model giving you the flexibility to co-mingle colors and fabrication material.

Here are identical cabinets with only difference being that they use different material palette components.

Material Palette

Every component that you place in your model has a material palette attribute. The name that you enter into this field defines the name of the palette that you are going to use. In the image above, Default has been entered. CabinetSense prefixes the word Palette to it and looks for the component with the name PaletteDefault, which is the palette component that ships with CabinetSense. You can make your own palettes and use them in your model by substituting your name in place of default.

Material

Every component and sub-component has a material field. The choices are:

• Carcass: Maps to material palette csCarcass<palettename>
• Construction: Maps to material palette csConstruction<palettename>
• Millwork: Maps to material palette csMillwork<palettename>
• Drawer: Maps to material palette csDrawer<palettename>
• Metal: Maps to material palette csMetal<palettename>
• Glass: Maps to material palette csGlass<palettename>
• Other: Maps to material palette csOther<palettename>
• <empty>: if you choose the blank item, you are defaulting to the parent material selection.

Type

In addition to selecting the material, you also designate whether you want a sheet good or dimensional lumber. Your choices are:

• Sheet: can be any type of sheet good (plywood, particleboard, mdf...)
• Lumber: typically this is hardwood used in door construction or face frames.
• <empty>: choosing this defaults to the parents type.

Mapping Material to shop goods

The material palette has attributes that allows you to specify the material that you want to build from. In the example below, we will be using the following sheet good material:

• Hardrock Maple Melamine Coated Particleboard for carcass and drawer construction
• Maple Veneer for millwork

Our hardwood will be Maple

When you export your model, all substitutions will be made for you. Any material that you fail to map, but is used in the export will show as cs<material> (EG. csConstruction)