material color not comming in?

[revitworkbench]

Ok, so I dont think Ive had this problem since grad school, so Im a little fuzzy on the details of how I once got it to work. But I have a family with a nested family which has materials associated to it (which are colored). everything looks fine in the both the nested family and once the nested family is loaded into its parent family. But when I load it into the project, I lose the colors of the associated materials (everything turns black)> if I remember correctly, I think it had something to do with phase filters, but I went in there and poked around for a minute, but didnt see any obvious culprits. What am I missing? I feel like it is something stupid but please help anyways! Thanks!

[CoreyDaun]

How did you go about changing the material/color? If you change the settings of a Material that is already defined in a Project, a loaded Family will adopt the Material definition that already exists within the Project in lieu of using its own definition.

[revitworkbench]

I chose the nylon material, duplicated it, renamed it, then changed its render appearance, surface pattern and cut pattern to what I wanted...

[CoreyDaun]

What version of Revit are you using?

[revitworkbench]

Revit 2014 (from Ultimate Suite)

[CoreyDaun]

To start - I've done little with the Material Browser, but I have found that if you 'duplicate' a Material, it retains an association with the original Material. Try using 'Create New Material' instead. But, do note what I said in my first reply. If you load this Family into another Family, that Material will be imported as well. This will only apply the first time, so if you have to change that Material in the Nested Family, reloading it will not replace that Material definition in the Host Family.

[revitworkbench]

How do i change the material/color of a loaded DWG saved as and RFA? It appears that the only thing it is possible to associate to is the default material. But if I load it into an new family or project it loses it automatically. Can I somehow duplicate the default in the host, and sort of reverse apply it to the nested family? Or how exactly do you color it? I cant paint it as far as the methods Ive tried. What gives? Thanks!

[CoreyDaun]

I don't believe there is much you can do from the Revit side. However, you should be able to define a color in the AutoCAD file. Attached is an example AutoCAD 2012 .dwg file with three colored cubes which retain their color once loaded into a Revit Family.