To achieve well-rendered products, each model needs to have materials associated with it. You will need to go through your current data to determine if the material is of good quality or if it needs work. If you do not provide materials, your product will not have any material associated with it (it will show up as the color of the AutoCAD layer) and users will be less likely to specify your products.

Material – a Material is an image, such as .jpg or .png. Images should be repeatable and small in file size, preferably less than 50 kb for medium quality. A good rule of thumb is that a material on 1m2 in CET should be 512px squared and 96 dpi. 

A tileable image

A non-tileable image

Note: Right now, the Commercial Interiors Library Extension cannot always handle materials the way you expect because of software limits. The main problem comes up when a material needs to be stretched (scaled) or repeated across a surface. CET usually repeats materials instead of stretching them, which sometimes causes issues.

There is also a technical limit: CET can only show up to 18 million pixels for one material area. This limit depends on the whole surface, not just one side, which makes it hard to know exactly when problems will show up.

Short-term solution
If you need a material to be stretched (scaled), you can resize your material image yourself to match the size of the surface. This is not perfect and may lower the quality, but it can help for now.

Future plans
We are looking into adding a clear choice in the system so you can decide if a material should repeat or scale. This will take planning and time, but future versions of our platform are expected to handle this better.