Learn/Drafting/Solid Modeling Tools
Materials & Mass Properties
Updated v2.3.7At a glance
- Assign real materials to bodies — steels, stainless, aluminum, brass, copper, titanium, plastics, wood, glass
- Bodies render their material under CAD lighting that reads clearly from every angle as you orbit
- Live weight, cost, volume, surface area, center of mass, bounding box, and inertia on every body
- Component properties roll up totals with a per-material weight and cost breakdown
- Color a whole body or an individual face without changing weight
- Search, favorites, standards, finishes, and JSON import/export in the material library
Every body carries a material — Mild Steel 1018 by default — that drives both how it looks in the viewport and what it weighs. Right-click a body in the browser and pick Properties to change its material and read its live statistics: weight, volume, surface area, center of mass, and bounding box, all in your preferred units and recomputed as you model.
The built-in library
Common shop stock is ready to assign: steels (1018, A36, 4140), stainless (304, 316), aluminum (6061, 5052), brass, copper, titanium, zinc, the usual plastics (ABS, acrylic, HDPE, nylon, polycarbonate, PTFE, PVC), wood, and glass. Each carries the correct density and a realistic finish — metals shade metallic, plastics satin, acrylic and polycarbonate translucent.
The Properties window is a live inspector — it doesn't dim the scene, so you can orbit and study the model while it's open, and it draws a center-of-mass marker and bounding box right in the view. An Advanced section adds moments of inertia, principal moments, and radius of gyration.
Cost
Give a material a price per pound and every part shows its cost alongside weight; a component's Properties totals the cost across all bodies and breaks it down per material — a quick estimate of what a job costs in each material.
Component totals
Right-click a component and pick Properties for the rollup across every body and sub-component: total weight, total cost, combined center of mass, overall bounding box, and a breakdown by material — the fastest answer to "how much 1018 is in this job?" A component can also set a default material that every new body inherits.
Color a body or a face
Paint a whole body from the swatch picker (or type a hex value) for a painted, anodized, or powder-coated look, or right-click a single face and choose Face → Set Color to color just that face — handy for weld prep, marking, or calling out a feature. Either way it's display-only: the body keeps its material, so weight and the per-material breakdown never change, and face colors stay put as you keep editing.
Your own materials
The library manager adds, edits, duplicates, and deletes custom materials — name, category, density in lb/in³ or g/cm³, cost, color, finish, standard designation, and tags. Search by name, standard, or tag; star your go-to materials for one-click assignment; and recently used materials surface automatically. Built-ins are read-only, but one click copies any of them into an editable version. Export your library to a file to share it between machines, and import a shop library someone sends you. A file opened on a machine without a referenced custom material still shows the right weight.