Material properties for the shapes come from the IES material database, which includes most typical materials you might need. To change a material, select a part use the [...] button next to "material" in the Project Manager | Modify tab, to open the material database dialog. After selecting Project Settings in the Modify tab, you can select the Base Material for your project. All materials in ShapeBuilder are linear, elastic, and isotropic. If you cannot find the material you need, you can add a custom material to the database.

Custom Materials

You can add custom materials to your system by clicking the Add Custom Material button in the Material Database dialog box. The Material Database dialog box can also be used to edit or delete a custom material by right clicking on the material. While only custom materials can be edited or removed, any material can be cloned as a custom material by right-clicking on the material. When defining a material, you can specify the material "type" making it possible to define custom materials that will be categorized as wood, steel, concrete etc. After selecting a material type, the defining properties have default values that can be modified for your custom material. If you do not know all of the defining properties for your material type, consider using a General material type where you only need to define four basic material properties: modulus of elasticity (E), Poisson's ratio (nu, n), the weight density (gamma, g), and the coefficient of thermal expansion (alpha, a). The Shear Modulus, G, is calculated internally as: G = E / (2*(1 + nu)). These materials are available in all IES products.

Custom Material Database

The Custom Material Database is a set of XML files used to manage the custom materials in the IES products. The XML files are stored on your machine at the following path: C:\Users\<your.login>\AppData\Local\IES\Customer\Materials. You may copy these files from one machine to another to share your customizations. While you can modify the database files manually outside of ShapeBuilder, this is generally not needed as you can add, remove, edit, and clone the custom materials in the Material Database dialog box as explained above. If you do decided to manually modify the database files, there are examples in the Materials folder for you to follow. You will need to restart the program to load any database changes.