Materials

A material says what a surface is, not how to draw it. Tag an area as Turf, and every look knows what to do with it: a conventional grass hatch on a CAD sheet, hand hatch in ink, scribble in marker, a wash in watercolor. Tag the parking lot as Asphalt and the walks as Concrete, and the whole plan restyles itself when you change look.

This is the single highest-value thing to do to an imported drawing. Half a dozen materials on the big areas is usually the whole setup.

Assigning a Material

• Fill and Stroke ▸ Fill ▸ Material, with a layer or an object selected.
• Right-click ▸ Material, on a layer or object in the scene tree, or on the canvas.

Assigning a material to a shape that came in as black or transparent CAD linework also gives it a sensible fill color to start from, so the drawing gets usable immediately instead of needing a color picked first.

The Materials

Group	Materials
Planting	Turf / Lawn, Planting Bed, Groundcover, Mulch
Paving and hardscape	Concrete, Asphalt, Pavers, Wood Deck, Gravel, Decomposed Granite, Stone
Water and ground	Water, Wetland, Sand, Soil / Earth, Riprap
Structures	Building, Roof
Untagged	None, the default: the surface is drawn from its own fill and texture settings only.

Material vs. Texture

The two coexist by a simple rule: an explicit texture always wins. A material only supplies the fill when the texture is set to None.

• Want the sheet to restyle itself when you change look? Set a material, leave the texture at None.
• Want this surface drawn exactly this way in every look? Set the texture.

Colors behave the same way. Your fill color is kept when the look changes; only the treatment over it changes.

Materials from CAD

CAD auto-mapping tags materials automatically wherever a hatch pattern name stands for a site material. An area hatched GRAVEL becomes Gravel, AR-CONC becomes Concrete, EARTH becomes Soil. It deliberately tags the material rather than pinning a texture, so CAD Line renders the way the sheet always did while the other looks stay free to restyle it.

Hatch patterns that are not site materials, such as ANSI section hatches, map to a texture directly, because there is no material they stand for.

Depth and Shadows

Some materials get extra attention in the looks that use depth shading: buildings and roofs take shadows and edge shading, and water takes a sheen from the sunlit side. That is another reason to tag structures as Building or Roof rather than leaving them as generic shapes. See Look Settings for the sun direction and depth controls.