Why don't colors match from Library Browser to Camera View?

[Dan Park]

Lighting hitting the surface is everything to how bright a color is. If you have 100% light on the surface it will look the color you see in the library. As you get more and more shadow on a surface it get's darker and and darker. Thus, unless you have direct light on a surface, you won't see the color as light as it might appear.

In the real world our eyes adjust to the lighting thus when we are in a dark room things look brighter.

Also when you get a chance find a room that has the exact same colors on the ceiling as the walls. Notice that the ceiling is in fact darker. Pure white colors will start to turn gray as they lose light.

There are some lighting materials in the library you can use that emit light. These can be used to brighten up a room that otherwise appears too dark. Often what we want to display on screen is not what we will see in real life.

A good example of this lighting is to simply draw a house and take a camera view from outside. Because we simulate sunlight coming from a direction other than straight down you will notice the colors on the walls change as you rotate around the building.

For those with AHD or the verison 8 products you can now brighten up colors on siding to create litterally any color you want with the color blender.

It was mentioned a tool that is a Chief Architect material tool that allows you to increase the emissivity. This tool basically makes a material emit light and if you move it to 100% you don't get shadowing effects on materials that are shaded. At this time this tool is not available in the consumer products.