Karl wrote:
The Artlantis forums have a "Shaders & Textures" subforum for just this question:
http://www.abvent.com/support/forum/index.php?site=us

There is no way to create your own shaders, but you can accomplish what you want easily and save the results for future use.

Basically, you want a different texture... so just apply the Basic (or Expert) shader to the surface, then click the "Edit" button next to "Texture mapping" in the Shader inspector. From there, click the "Add" button and browse to your image and adjust the size, tiling, etc.

Note that you can add multiple texture images here and vary the transparency, bump, etc of each, as well as adjust a color overlay.

For example, you will want your brick tiled and fully opaque. But, perhaps you have a photo of a sign that you want to appear on the wall. That can be added as another texture, set to not tile, sized as needed, and then visually dragged (while pressing the M key) to where the sign should appear on the wall. (You can also drag and drop image files onto surfaces for this kind of thing, tweaking the size afterwards.)

For your brick, set the specular to low and the roughness to high by dragging the box that adjusts both at the same time (read off the S and R values).

If you are happy with your brick pseudo-shader and want to use it in a future project, save a "Postcard". In the later project, open the postcard and just drag the desired surface from the postcard onto the model.

Have fun,
Karl

PS Note that applied textures "stick" ... so if you drag another shader on top of this surface later - say one of the actual brick shaders - your brick will still be 'attached'. You'll have to click on the Edit button in the shader inspector and then Delete your texture before the shader's internal texture will appear properly. You'll typically run into this when opening an ArchiCAD model, as ArchiCAD materials appear in Artlantis as applied textures...can't drag and drop Artlantis textures until you clear the ArchiCAD ones.

PPS The Dosch Construction Materials shader library (extra cost but worth it IMHO) has some nice high resolution brick walls and much more there. Some are of entire large walls, so there is no visible repeat pattern when they are applied. Superior to the standard Artlantis shaders ... which are in turn superior to anything delivered with ArchiCAD.

Karl wrote:
Just an update to this old thread to note that Artlantis 2 and above does allow for user-created shaders.