Material selector
The material selector determines how a surface looks: color, finish and, where needed, a texture. It appears wherever an element has a material — on buildings, terrain surfaces, building parts and imported models.
The material selector dialog.
Presets
The fastest way there is a preset: polished steel, nickel silver, iron, cast iron and other ready-made materials. The approach is select a preset, adjust settings, then save.
Appearance
- Color and texture, the image on the surface.
- Tile size in real-world metres (not model scale): how large the texture is in reality, set separately for U (X) and V (Y). The value is a length, not a unitless number: a brick wall at 1 m per repeat looks right at any scale.
- Tile: whether the texture repeats or is laid down once.
Textures Raily draws itself
The texture dialog doesn't only list images. New generated… builds a texture from its description, and Adjust… takes a generated one as a starting point.
| Texture | |
|---|---|
| Brick | Stretcher, English, cross and Flemish bond, new or weathered, brick and mortar color |
| Roof | Plain tile, pantile or slate |
| Stone | Ashlar, setts, granite, sandstone, marble |
| Wood | Sawn boards with width and grain |
| Corrugated sheet | Corrugated or box profile, true to its real pitch |
| Surface | Concrete, precast, asphalt, sand, earth, roofing felt |
| Rust, Patina | the two weathering effects |
All of them compute from real-world dimensions: you specify how wide a brick is, not how many pixels it has. That way the same texture fits at any scale, and the preview shows it singly or tiled.
Adjust creates a new texture
A generated texture is its description: change a value and it becomes a different texture, and the old one stays wherever it's already in use. So you never modify a model just because it happens to use the same texture.
Show legacy
The Show legacy switch brings in the images from Raily 4. For a new plan, it's worth looking at the generated ones first: they're sharper, because they're drawn at the size they're needed at.
Surface
- Metalness: how strongly the surface reflects like metal. High for rail profiles, zero for masonry.
- Roughness: how matte the reflection is. Low gives a mirror gloss, high a dull material.
- Emission: how strongly the surface glows on its own. For a lit window or a signal; not a substitute for a lamp, since a glowing surface doesn't light up anything but itself.
Special
A few materials follow their own rendering instead of the normal surface calculation:
| Special | Effect |
|---|---|
| None | Normal material |
| Water | Water surface with its own reflection |
| Crystal (fallback) | Translucent material |
Under Special Parameters are the values each special material needs.
Preview
The preview shows the material either on the element itself (Element preview) or on a neutral standard shape (Standard preview). Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.