Help centre · Modelling

Materials and finishes

Paint surfaces with real-size finishes, adjust tile size, rotation and position, make finishes from your own photos and add your own skies.

Finishes are real materials at their real size: bricks are 215 × 65 mm on every wall, and boards and tiles repeat as they would on site. You paint them onto surfaces one part at a time.

Paint a surface

Press B for the Paint Bucket, or open Library and click a swatch under Materials. The groups run from Paint & plaster and Brick & block to Timber, Tiles, Flooring, Roofing and Landscape.
Click a surface. Only that part is painted.
Pick another swatch to switch finishes, and click Done or press Esc when you've finished.

Each click paints one part:

one side of a wall (each side has its own finish)
the top or the underside of a floor slab
a roof's tiles or its gables
a stair's flights or its rails
one part of a piece of furniture, such as a sofa's cushions or its legs

Alt-click a surface to pick up its finish and paint with it. Painting can be undone like anything else.

Paint one face of a solid

To paint a single face of a shape or imported model, double-click it to open it, press B, then click the face. That face gets its own finish and the rest stay as they were. See Shapes and push/pull.

Adjust the tile size, rotation and position

Select something painted and look under Finishes in the Properties panel. Each finish it uses has its own controls:

Tile size scales the pattern. Turn on Width and height apart to set Tile width and Tile height separately.
Rotation turns the pattern, and Turn 90° turns it a quarter, so boards can run the other way.
Move across and Move up slide the pattern by up to one tile. Use them to line a brick course up with a sill, or a board joint with a door.

Change one object or everywhere

At the top of Finishes, choose where your changes go:

This object gives the selection its own copy of the finish first, so boards can run the other way in one room only.
Everywhere changes every surface that uses the finish.

A finish's colour is on the Material tab, and changing it there changes it everywhere the finish is used.

Make a finish from a photo

In Library → Materials, choose My finishes, then From a photo, and pick a picture of brick, stone, timber or fabric.
Give it a Name, and set Width and Height to how much of the surface the photo shows in reality, such as a few bricks or a whole board. It repeats at that size.
Choose matte, satin or gloss, then click Make and paint.

Your finish is kept in the project, so it travels with it to other devices, collaborators and share links. Its menu has Real size… to change its size and Delete. Surfaces painted with a deleted finish keep its colour.

You can also start from the Material tab: Use a photo… turns a picture into a finish 1 m across and paints the selected material with it.

Light the model with a sky

Under Skies in the Library, click a sky to light the model with it, with real reflections. Below the skies:

Turn rotates the sky round the model.
Light strength makes it brighter or dimmer.
Show as background shows the sky behind the model, and Soften background blurs it.
Remove sky goes back to the plain background.

The sky is saved with the project. For sunlight and shadows at a real place and time, see Site and sun.

Add your own sky

Under Skies, in Your own, click Upload HDRI (.hdr, .exr) and pick a file. It's added to the project and lights the model straight away. Like your own finishes, it's kept in the project and goes wherever the project goes. Its menu has Delete.

To clear out finishes and skies you no longer use, choose Edit → Purge unused (see Groups, components and tags).

Still stuck? Contact us, or ask in the app: Help → Contact support.