Autocad 2013 Materials: Pool of Liquid Enigma?!?

[Ender]

Hi, I'm an Autocad Architecture user (the 2013 student version) and I was wondering if someone can solve a mystery for me. In Acad's Material library there are some Water materials you can choose from such as Swamp, Swimming Pool, Tropical etc, but I can't figure out how they're supposed to be used to save my life. When I check the properties of water materials, in the little preview window they are applied to a "Pool of Liquid" geometry. Am I supposed to create that sort of geometry? How? I don't get it. It's embarrasing, really. Must be some little obvious thing i'm missing.

 

I'd like to ask some of the more experienced people here to explain to me, if possible, how I'm supposed to work with these water materials.

 

Thanks in advance!

[ReMark]

Couldn't a "pool of liquid" be whatever geometry used to create a body of water? In a pool could it not be a surface used to represent the top of the water?

 

Materials can be attached to objects or assigned to specific layers. Example: maybe you have a layer expressly called "Water" and the material is assigned to this layer.

[Ender]

Hey, thanks for answering, that came a lot quicker that I expected!

 

Normally when I need a water effect in acad I create my own material with bump waves and the reflectivity amount and tint I need and then I apply it to a flat surface that represents the body of water. But when I apply those mysterious water materials to a flat surface they don't render like water at all. Witness this quick render:

 

 

- the upper left corner is my custom material and the lower right is the acad library's Clear Lake material.

 

Now, the preview of the Clear Lake material looks like this:

 

 

It looks somewhat like water when applied to the "Pool of Liquid" and not to the "Plane". What sort of geometry is PofL supposed to be? Some rippled surface that I have to model? That's what I don't get.

 

Thanks again for answering!

[tzframpton]

Don't apply it to a plane... apply it to a 3D Solid, like a Box. This Material needs "volume" to look correctly, and a plane has no volume. This is only my best guess anyways. I personally have never tried this in AutoCAD, but in other rendering applications I have and this is the technique I use.

 

I'm interested in seeing the results.