For brands, a well-organized material library is essential. It significantly enhances the visual quality of your designs and accelerates your product development process, saving you valuable time and boosting efficiency. Romans CAD (RCS) provides the tools to seamlessly build, manage, and apply materials, ensuring consistent, high-quality results across all your projects.
Let's explore the importance of a robust material library and how RCS empowers you to create one.
Three approaches to building your material library in RCS
RCS provides diverse methods for constructing your material library, accommodating various workflows and requirements. Whether you prefer scanning real-world textures, leveraging digital material libraries, or integrating with existing systems, RCS offers comprehensive support.
1. Capture hyper-realism by scanning real-world materials.
Scanning real-world materials is the optimal approach when you need unparalleled realism in your designs. This technique captures every subtle detail, from the grain of leather to the weave of fabric, ensuring your textures appear incredibly lifelike.
How It Works:
• Scan the Material: Employ specialized equipment to capture textures and properties like color, roughness, bump, and opacity. A variety of material scanners are available on the market.
• Import into RCS: Directly import your scanned materials into the RCS material library, complete with detailed descriptions.
Pro Tip: Contact us for recommendations on the best tools for your specific needs.
This method is ideal for designers who require precise, real-world textures and want complete control over their material assets.
2. Integrate Digital Material Libraries
Integrating digital material libraries such as Swatchbook©™ or Substance by Adobe©™ provides a fast and efficient alternative when scanning isn't feasible. These platforms offer vast collections of high-quality, professionally curated materials—from metals to textiles—that you can quickly import and use in your RCS projects.
This approach is perfect for designers seeking a rapid and easy way to access a diverse range of materials while retaining flexibility and control over their appearance.
3. Import materials from Your PLM/ERP System
RCS facilitates directly integrating materials from your company's existing PLM or ERP system into your product development workflow. This is particularly beneficial for teams that require centralized, consistent material management across multiple projects.
Streamline material management with macro family/family/sub-family structures
RCS enhances material organization through its intuitive macro family/family/sub-family hierarchy, seamlessly aligning with your product development process and business requirements. This structured approach ensures precise categorization and scalability.
For example:
• Macro family: leather
• Family: natural genuine leather / synthetic / vegan / exotic
• Sub-family: full-grain leather / top-grain leather / suede / nubuck
Materials can be further refined by attributes such as size, color, and supplier, enabling efficient management of variations and ensuring consistency across projects. You can also adjust pricing based on seasonal trends and supplier agreements.
The RCS raw material library enables a seamless combination of materials and colors to create virtually limitless design possibilities.
At the engineering level, the RCS digital platform provides comprehensive reports on material properties, sustainability, BOM as follows:
• 3D level: enhances rendering with high-quality, realistic materials.
• 2D level: supports Production Bill of Materials (BOM) creation, ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
• Surface Length (SL) level: calculates material consumption, helping you optimize resource usage.
• Cutting rooms level: ensures seamless integration, enabling precise material nesting during production.
Furthermore, the RCS API enables effortless integration with external systems like ERP and PLM, ensuring real-time synchronous data flow and consistency across your organization.
Ready to Elevate Your Development Process?
Building a material library in RCS is more than just an organization. It's about unlocking your productivity by centralizing all your materials data in a unique place and updating them easily (price, properties, suppliers, etc.). Right from the start, at the design level, one can generate a pre-BOM and control the target price.
Start building your material library today and experience the transformative impact it can have on your 3D designs. With RCS, you're not just creating models—you're crafting your next masterpiece.