There are two ways for defining materials in Karamba3D: Either select a material by name from a list of materials (see section 3.4.2) or set mechanical material properties manually (see below).
The Appendix (see section A.2.1) contains additional information on mechanical properties of materials.
Materials constitute a property of cross sections. There are two ways of attaching materials to cross sections:
In order to directly assign a material to a cross section, plug it into the corresponding cross section creation component. This is overridden by indirect material definitions via the “Assemble” component as described below.
Materials (like cross sections) may be plugged into the “Assemble” component. They know about the elements (or element sets) they apply to by their “Elems|Ids” property: This is a list of strings containing element identifiers (see section 3.1.6) or regular expressions that match a group of element identifiers (element-ids). Upon assembly each element-id is compared to all “Elems|Ids” entries of a material. In case they match the material is attached to the element. An empty string – which is the default value – signifies that the material shall be applied to all elements.