In the last stop of our BricsCAD Shape Journey, we looked at how to transform entities. During this whistlestop tour, we’ll look at how to add materials to your entities in BricsCAD Shape. You’ll be surprised how easy it is!
You’ll find materials on the right-hand panel in the Icons Strip (it’s the paintbrush icon). If you click it the Materials panel will appear.
BricsCAD Shape Material types
There are 11 BricsCAD Shape material categories:
- Earth
- Fabric
- Glass
- Metal
- Redway (realsitic)
- Scribbly
- Solid Colors
- Stone
- Tiles
- Water
- Wood
Use the search bar to look for an item or navigate via the buttons.
Adding materials to your model
To add a material to your model simply click the material and drag-and-drop.
To assign the material to the entire solid hold Ctrl while dragging and dropping. You can duplicate material assignments by hitting Alt whilst clicking the face of any solid that already has the assigned material.
To assign the same material to multiple entities at the same time, pre-select the entities. Then drag and drop the materials.

Deleting materials
Use the Erase tool to remove materials from an object. It works exactly the same as adding material but in reverse.
What’s Next?
I hope you enjoyed this quick guide to the BricsCAD Shape materials. Join me next time when I will be showing you how to use BricsCAD Shape components.
Watch the webinar “BricsCAD Shape in 10 minutes”
I think Shape is fantastic. Also is that it can be used on linux systems too.
Is it possible to add user materials? Not just the predefined ones? In linux beside the DefaultMaterials there is an empty folder called UserMaterials. How can I create and put my own materials in it?
I’m pleased to hear that you are enjoying Shape! You can find more information on materials in BricsCAD here: https://blog.bricsys.com/free-texture-images-materials-render/
Thank You for the huge library info, but I do not succeed to add the image files to Shape. There is no materials command to create my own materials. The default materials comes with a “somematerial.dwg” file, then in the containing folder, there is a folder called “textures”, and in it is a “somematerial.png”, contained by the “somematerial.dwg”. The material “somematerial” can be used only if both files exists and have the same name – and only the original name. If I rename any of the two, the material do not work anymore.
How can be created in Shape that user defined “somematerial.dwg” with the “somematerial.png” in it?
Thank You!
You need at least BricsCAD classic, to create your own matterils in BricsCAD. You are welcome to download a free 30-day trial of BricsCAD and create as many materials as you like in this time.