Part materials, edge bandings, coatings.

How to use them in A>V>C> plugins

Materials database

First, you will have to create your own database of materials. You can take the materials that are in AutoCAD, use their textures for clarity. The database will have to be stored in some drawing. It will not be possible to save it somewhere in Excel or third-party databases, since textures cannot be loaded from the outside. But in the future, I may make an on-line database of materials. I have even already provided for the Article field, where you can write some code for connecting to third-party databases.

The optimal place to store frequently used materials, in my opinion, is your dwt template file. If you create a dwt file with all the styles, layers and layouts you need, then why not place all the materials there. If you save such a file in the common folder of your workgroup, you will get a common database of materials. If you link this file to the QNew command as a template for creating a new drawing, then all these materials will appear in all your new drawings. Just do not forget to call _Purge at the end of the design - a drawing with a thousand materials will not be small.

If you are not happy with the fact that new drawings will be "thick" right away, you can store materials in another dwt file and assign this file as a template for layers and other things in the Common Options of the A>V>C> plugins.

The A>V>C> Properties Palette can search for both of these templates, and when you open the list of materials, you see both the materials of the current drawing and the materials of the template. No extra effort is required to pull the material from the template into the current drawing. The palette will do everything itself.

So, open your dwt template file. First, let's check what units of measurement we will be working in - look at and correct the _insunits system variable. Inches - 1, Millimeters - 4. You can also set up units in the A>V>C> Palette on the Dwg tab.

Now, create boxes of any size (purely for clarity) and assign them textures from those available in the AutoCAD collection. It doesn't matter how you assign the material - through the properties panel, the A>V>C> Palette, or by dragging the material from the materials panel (_materials command) onto the solid. By default, the parts are assigned the ByLayer material, and all layers are assigned the Global material. A>V>C> programs understand what ByLayer means and in the A>V>C> Palette you will see the final, real, applied Global material. By the way, assigning a material to layers in AutoCAD is not that easy. For some reason, materials were removed from the layers panel. You need to call a special command _MATERIALATTACH. In BricsCAD, everything is done in a human way, materials are assigned to layers in the same way as color and other things. Special materials Global, ByLayer and ByBlock cannot be renamed and it is not advisable to reconfigure them. The ByBlock material causes considerable confusion - it is better not to use it ever.

Next, open the A>V>C> Palette, select a cube and see that the solid has been assigned a material and a separate Material tab has appeared.

The most convenient way to edit materials is to use the Drawing Tree (DwgTree). Then you can select a material in the tree and immediately edit it in the A>V>C> Properties Palette, even if it is not yet assigned to any solid. And it is easy to find all the parts made from the same material.

Material properties

The palette takes the name, color and description of the material from the usual properties of the render material, and everything else is properties added by the A>V>C> programs. They will be saved in the drawing in the xData of the material. To see them and use them on another computer, you will definitely need the A>V>C> programs. Of course, it is better to edit materials in the template, so that you can reuse them later. If you have already used the material in some drawing, then its changes cannot be transferred back to the template in any way. Only delete the material from the template and then copy the material. And materials are copied between drawings only together with parts (By the way, AutoCAD cannot copy solid face materials between drawings at all. You have to create a block and use the BUpdate command).

Material name

You will only see the material name in the selection lists. Materials with the same name cannot exist in one drawing. Therefore, you will have to come up with a very short but unique name. It is not enough to simply write MDF. Most likely, you will want to separately account for MDF with a thickness of 16 and MDF with a thickness of 8. So you need to enter them separately with different names. For example, MDF16 and MDF08. I enter a zero before 8 to "align the digits", because in alphabetical order, 08 will be before 10, and 8 - after. If the materials differ only in color, you will have to enter the color in the name. It is better to use a color code, because everyone sees color names differently, and codes are unambiguous and shorter. You can use the color codes of the material manufacturer or universal codes NCS, Pantone, etc.

Use

The most important property is Use. It is imperative to decide how the material will be used, how to account for its quantity. When you assign a cover or edge banding material via the A>V>C> palette, you will only see the materials Usage = "Cover" and Usage = "Banding" in the drop-down lists. There are three systems for accounting for the amount of material: by volume, by area, by length. By default, the material is assigned the area accounting system Usage = "Sheet". In this case, the amount of material will be calculated in sheets and square meters|inches. And if you need to count linear meters|inches, assign Usage = "Rod". If the material should be accounted for in cubic meters|inches - "Volume". If you often work with rolled products, pipes, you can switch the default usage type to "Rod" in the Properties Palette settings and all new and unconfigured materials will be counted in linear meters|inches. Accordingly, the price for the material must be entered per unit of volume, or area, or length. Here you can choose what is more convenient for you - enter MDF as an array, assign a price per cubic meter and do not write the sheet thickness in the name. This will reduce the number of MDF types. Or enter a pack of different MDF materials as "Sheet" with different sheet thicknesses in the name and prices per square meter. Decide as you like.

The type of material usage also affects the solid metric: the calculation of the part dimensions and the manufacturing technology. For the correct measurement of round pipes, it is necessary to specify the material type "Rod".

Index

A short material index can be used (or not) for callouts in drawings and edge lists. This is only necessary to avoid writing the full name of the material in the drawing each time, which can be very long. The A>V>C> palette itself comes up with unique indexes for each material by the first letter of the name (or by the first letter of the second word, and so on). And the Data Table and Table of Materials  programs can check the uniqueness of the indexes and re-index them so that there are no matches. And so that consumers of your drawing understand what is hidden behind the letter M, you need to add a "legend" to each drawing sheet - a simple list "Index - Name" for each material. The Table of Materials (MatTable) can make such a list (see style 2.Material Indexes)

This style of the MatTable offers you to create a simple MText, not a table. But you can change the settings. And, by the way, you can update such text in 2 clicks: you only need to select the viewport on the sheet and the old text. Click MatTable, and the program itself finds objects in the viewport and fills in the text based on them. Without a single question - click and done.

Article

Each draftsman can give a different name to the material. But to understand that it is still one material, a unique code is needed - Article. The article is also useful for communication with procurement databases, store catalogs. Try to choose an article so that it is never accidentally repeated anywhere else. So far, the A>V>C> programs do not use the article anywhere. You can come up with some kind of your own role for it.

Price

Although the A>V>C> palette substitutes the local currency symbol in this field (it is specified in the Windows settings), but you can use any currency in the world. You only need to set your own formatting for the %cost:0.00 tugrik% substitution in all tables. It is important to assign a price for the correct unit of material. Keep in mind that in a millimeter drawing, millimeters are converted to meters and the price is needed not per square millimeter, but per meter. In inch and other drawings, no recalculations are made. You can't set a price per sheet or per ton. But the field has a calculator built in to quickly recalculate into the correct units.

Let's look again at the A>V>C> Common Options. Do you see the "price calculation" section?

These are very important settings if you want to bring the estimated price of parts closer to the actual cost. Here you specify how much material to take "in reserve", "on cut" for each part, each surface, each edge. Trimmings of whips and edges are specified in units of the drawing length: inches or millimeters (without recalculation into meters). The remaining reserves are simply a percentage of the area/volume of the part. Of course, this is a very rough accounting. But trust my experience - it gives very close to reality data on large volumes of work. The default values ​​​​are taken from my practice. A huge reserve for each edge banding is taken for a manual edgebanding machine, which has a roller to knife 150 mm. If you have a conveyor-type machine making edges, you need to greatly reduce this figure.

Density

This figure is needed to calculate the weight. No reserves are taken into account here. In a millimeter drawing, write the density in kilograms per cubic meter. In all the others, take any overseas unit of weight and divide by the unit of the drawing in cube. For example, pounds per cubic inch (if _insunits=4). The program itself does not write the units of weight anywhere. You can specify them when formatting substitutions, you can make some recalculations of units directly with substitutions - the A>V>C> programs will calculate the formulas in the table fields if the cell begins with =. There are no restrictions, everything is in your hands, you just need to configure it. The weight of coatings and edges is not taken into account, so you can not write the density.

Color

If the material does not have a texture, then AutoCAD will show only its color. In fact, two colors are used for rendering - diffuse and ambient. But for simplicity, only one is presented in the palette. The color can be left empty and then the material will become invisible, the color of the solid will be displayed. You can do the same in the regular material settings dialog if you assign a color "ByObject". If you still assign a color to the material, then the A>V>C> Palette can change the color of solids along with the material. That is, when you assign a material to a solid or its face, the palette also changes the color of the solid. This is done in order to see the color of the material even in visual styles without textures, even in a 2D wireframe. It is better not to change the color of an already used material, because the colors of the solids will not change themselves and you will have to call the long AvcUpdate command.

Grain/Texture

This checkbox means that the material is colored unevenly, if there is an obvious "grain direction", like wood. If you do not check it, then each time the solid is measured, its Texture property will be reset, because since the material does not have a texture, then the solids do not need it. And if the material has Texture enabled, then the solids will be assigned a texture "along" by default. You can disable automatic assignment of texture to solids.

Unfortunately, for now these Texture properties of materials and solids are purely virtual and do not affect rendering in any way - you will have to use standard AutoCAD tools to rotate the real wood pattern.

Dimensions

This refers to a piece of material as it is sold: the size of an MDF sheet, a molding whip, an edge coil, and the like. The Table of Materials program can recalculate the amount of material from square meters to sheets, from linear meters to coils, that is, from drawing units to "pieces". Of course, the dimensions must be specified in drawing units in strict accordance with _insunits. If you do not recalculate, you can omit the dimensions. The program does not yet check that you have mixed up the material, assigning parts with a thickness of 8 to a material with a thickness of 16. I think I will do such a check in the future. It is important to set the thickness for edges - the Sawing  Table (SAW) program will subtract the thickness from the size of rectangular parts.

Milling cutter / Milling mode / Saw blade / Sawing mode

These four text fields help to create the correct layers for export to CNC machines. If you need to set up layers in a special way for milling/sawing the material, specify some special processing modes, then you can not edit the layer templates in the NC Preparation (NCP) program settings, but use the corresponding substitutions that will take data from these material properties.

Assigning Materials

Now that we have a materials database in our template, we create a new drawing. Again, we check that we are working in the same _insunits units that the materials database is compiled for. The program does not check for unit mismatches and does not recalculate anything itself.

Next, as usual, we make a solid blank of the product, cut it into assemblies, peel off the parts from the blanks-assemblies, combine them into assembly blocks, place the fixtures, check, approve, extrude fixture holes. 

And now, when the model is completely ready, we begin to assign materials. Why not right away? The thing is that many modeling commands do not take into account that materials have already been assigned to the parts. And they break everything. Things are especially bad with the materials of the solid faces - they change with almost any commands, are assigned at random or disappear irretrievably. Therefore, if you have to cut/glue an already painted model - be extremely careful. Most likely, you will have to assign all the materials again.

There are many different ways to assign a material: assign it to a layer, drag it from the Materials panel onto a solid, select it from the list in the Properties panel or the A>V>C> Properties Palette. The last option is the coolest: in the drop-down list of materials, you can see your entire library, even if you have _Purge'd the drawing. After all, the palette reads this list from the template. In addition, you can create a new material right in this field. Just type the name of a non-existent material and (oops!) a new material will appear in the drawing. Its properties will be copied from the old material that the solid had before. The edges and coatings will immediately be assigned the correct assignment. (By the way, you can create new layers in the Properties Palette in exactly the same way).

Important: assigning a material to a solid via the A>V>C> palette will save the information about the materials of its faces. Any other method of assigning a material will reset all edges and coatings.

Next, you may need to assign materials to the faces of the solid. For example, to calculate how much paint is needed for all the parts. And to mark the edges on the drawing. Let's assume that we have drawn a solid together with all the coatings, according to the outer dimensions. And the thickness of the edges and coatings will then be subtracted by the Sawing  Table (SAW) program (if necessary and if it can).

In the A>V>C> Properties Palette (and in the regular properties panel) you will now see the properties of the selected faces, including the material. This is what we need. This is not the material of the "insides" of the solid, but the coating material on the surface. We will use it for any coatings|covers: painting, pasting with colored film, lamination, edge banding. Of course, changing the face material does not affect the geometry of the solid in any way. That is, it turns out that the solid is the same, the edge thickness is not taken into account anywhere. We only see a change in the face color. And we see it only if a color is assigned or the Realistic visual style is enabled. Frankly speaking, we are using the render material for other purposes, hacking AutoCAD. But there is simply nowhere else to save data on coatings. If the coating material is already in the template or drawing, select it from the list, if not, enter a new name.

Usually, the faces are assigned the same material as the entire solid. The A>V>C> palette shows an empty material line.

If you change the solid material not through the A>V>C> palette - all the face settings will be lost.

Another well-known AutoCAD bug - if you assign at least one face a color or material, AutoCAD starts to confuse the faces. You click (via Ctrl) on one face, and something else is selected at the other end of the solid. You have to switch to the 2D wireframe mode - it does not glitch.

And sometimes, if you assign the same material to all surfaces, the material of the solid itself suddenly changes. When copying parts Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V, the materials disappear, and when copying via _Copy, they are saved. Be careful, Autodesk has carefully laid out rakes everywhere. 

It is important to understand the principle of edge listing. When measuring a solid, the program goes around the outer perimeter of the front plane and makes a list of the surfaces adjacent to it. The ends are always listed in the order of the bypass, starting from the lower left point of the contour. That is, the left side of the rectangle is edge number 1. This refers to the left side of the part laid out by the Lay program. The position of the edges in the original assembly does not matter, the LAY usually turns the parts over. In the Common Options, you can enable and configure the letter names of the ends. By default: L-left, T-upper, R-right, B-lower. The ends on the edges of the contour, directed strictly along X and Y are designated by these letters instead of a number. The numbers and these letters are used in both the Properties Palette and the Sawing Table.

Details

The main work is done, now we just need to design the drawings. We lay out the parts using the LAY command. In the settings, we can set such a description of the part to get information about the materials (and all this is already done by default). The material will be indicated in the header of the layout group, which means that parts made of different materials will end up in different "columns". And the part signature will contain a full description of the covers and edges in the most compressed form.

In the part headers we get something like:

Asm# 1.1 MDF 16 876x363 - 1pc.

Covers - Front: White gloss paint

Edge bandings - All: White gloss paint

or

Asm#1.4 Chipboard Egger H3129 25 819.1x509 - 1pc.

Edge bandings - T/R/B: PVC 2mm Egger H3129

That is, when all the edge bandings are the same, the program writes - All. When different on a rectangle, it lists the designations L|T|R|B. And on a curved part, it will designate the edges by their lengths. There may be several edge materials - the program will list them all in the order of going around the part in a circle.

After laying out the parts, you can start designing the detailing. You can combine the layout and the creation of sheets with viewports with one command Detailing Drawings (DDraw). Or you can call the command for placing dimensions and callouts Dimensions for Detailing (DimDet) separately. It has many options, but we are only concerned with face Cover Leaders now.

You may want to move the dimensions and leaders a little, but in general the drawings of the parts are designed automatically. And there is a full guarantee that all the edge bandings that you have put in the model are all here, on the leaders. Nothing needs to be added or corrected. Nothing is forgotten. And another engineer who, for example, will export the parts of your model to DXF, will receive exactly the same data on materials, covers and edge bandings. This is a very important point for teamwork - all the information in the model, the model is always correct, and the drawings, if anything, can be redone at the snap of a finger.

Smart Leaders

It is not difficult at all to transform an assembly view into material designations. Set up Smart Leaders to put not the solid name, but the name of its material %mat% or the material index %matindex%. That's all - place leaders on any viewport where your parts are visible, and the program will automatically insert the material data.

And note that in the Smart Leaders settings there is an option "Faces of solid". It replaces information about the solid with information about one of its surfaces, which is indicated by the leader arrow. This can include the cover material.

Tables

Now we can design the Sawing Table (SAW). In theory, we have already drawn all the curved parts and parts with holes in the drawings, and for the table we left only simple rectangles that do not need drawings. We will give them to be sawed with a saw. This is how the sawing table program is configured by default - all parts except rectangles are filtered out. But until engineers had A>V>C> plugins, they were so lazy to draw detailing that they invented incredibly complex tables with terrible incomprehensible designations and stuffed all the parts in a row there. And sometimes the unfortunate furniture makers in production even managed to understand this Egyptian literacy. Although more often they re-invented the entire design from scratch. All this incredible stupidity is a thing of the past. Drawings of parts are now easy to make, detailed design is not required - the CNC saws everything along the contours from DXF. But the habit remained and many engineers have to face the requirement to describe all the details about all the parts in the table. Of course, the Sawing Table program will not be able to reproduce all the perversions of all inventors, but it can describe the covers and edge bandings on rectangular parts. Use the %covers% and %bandings% substitutions. Moreover, you can even write down which sides at what angle of inclination of the disk to saw. Use the %slopes% substitution for this.

And one more bonus - it is enough to write the edge banding thickness in the material properties and the program will reduce the dimensions of the part by this value. Banding on both sides - means it will subtract twice. The subtraction program is currently made in the simplest way and works only with rectangles. Only the edges from the extreme ends directed along X and Y (on the laid out part) are subtracted. This should be taken into account. If the table contains a triangular part, the banding from the hypotenuse will not be subtracted. And this program does not correct the drawings in any way - the contours of the part in the NCP and DXF Export programs will be made on the outside of the solid, without any offsets on the edges. You can select the entire model and create a single table of parts. Or you can select one viewport with one assembly on each assembly sheet and at the same time select an empty filing table. And then call the Saw command. The program will find all the parts in the viewport itself and, noticing that some table has been selected, will immediately insert the data into it. This way you will get separate tables of parts for each assembly. Of course, you need to pre-configure the Saw command, specify that you want to output data to a dwg table, not to Excel. And it is advisable to save sheets with viewports and empty tables in the right places in the template in advance.

A complete table with all the designations may look like this in Excel, for example:

Here the letters indicating the ends have been replaced with arrows.

The area in this table, as in the solid metric, is not the total area of ​​all its surfaces, but the area of ​​one main (front) surface. That is, exactly the area that we need to calculate the consumption of sheet material.

And finally, let's make a table of materials for purchase. Just call MatTable for the entire model.

You can see that the sheets and coatings are taken into account in square meters, and the banding are in linear meters. The column with the funny name "Pieces" shows the amount of material converted into sheets and coils. I couldn't think of another name - tell me if you have any ideas. This amount may be useful to suppliers. And in the end, we see the full estimate for all materials. Of course, you can also customize this table as you like. You can remove the totals by group, or remove the groups altogether. You can rename the columns. You can write formulas to calculate, for example, the weight in ounces or centners.