topic Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials? in FormIt Forum

Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

AurangzaibMahmood — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 16:32:38 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I have a question?

I just created some furniture on Formit and group them (assigned them to furniture) from here I imported them to Revit using the revit addon.

Everything is fine from here, but how to I assign them a material texture?

How someone show me how I can do this in the family editor or in revit.

The standard colour coming through from the import is the grey.

Please see my screenshots!!

Regards,

Aurangzaib Mahmood

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Tobias_Hathorn — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 15:35:12 GMT

Hello! Currently there is not a great way to do this in Revit. You would have to go to the Family Editor and select the geometry and click 'explode' on the ribbon - this will make the import a series of faces that can be painted (in the family or in the project).

Or you can specify a material for the entire Furniture Systems category in the Object styles dialog.

We are working on a much better solution that will be available soon (in the coming months).

Thanks,

Tobias

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

sagar3663khot — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 23:42:05 GMT

instead going to family editor try to use paint tool which is there in view bar you can apply any material to the face so if you select your mass(formit model) by doing that you can get your material on the mass itself. but if you want that material to be in schedule and tags then i have no idea. and whatever you create on formit it turns out to be mass only and you can't change the category of mass to any other easily coz revit don't allow you to do that

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 17:18:06 GMT

Needs to be updated: http://www.graitec.co.uk/blog/entry/moving-files-from-sketch-up-to-revit.

But still gray for me. Maybe I'm missing something. Do I have to tell Revit where these textures are?

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Tobias_Hathorn — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 17:27:34 GMT

A few things to try / confirm:

- Are you using the FormIt add-in for Revit or are you using the cloud conversion service?

- Material transfer only works in Revit 2018 and 2019

- Make sure you have the latest version of FormIt Add-in (check in Windows add / remove programs). You need version 1.9.4 found on this page https://formit.autodesk.com/page/download

- If you do have the latest FormIt Add-in, you could try uninstalling the current one, and re-installing it

Let me know if these suggestions help,

Tobias

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 17:56:56 GMT

Thank you for the quick reply. I moved to R2018 and now it works.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 19:37:22 GMT

Ok... From SketchUp to FormIt the textures are looking good, but when I bring FormIt into Revit my jpg texture's scale is to small.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Tobias_Hathorn — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 20:48:21 GMT

oh - that's interesting. Can you post the skp or formit axm file? I would like to test that too - and I can share it with our development team for advice. May be a bug - and there may be a workaround by adjusting texture size in Revit. But I'd still want to know what's causing the issue. Thanks for reporting it!

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 15:58:39 GMT

It is totally a scaling issue. The textures jpeg comes in at 25.4 when it should be more like 500. The jpeg at 500 in Revit looks quite close to what it did in FormIt. Please, find attached SkUp and FormIt files.

Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 15:11:23 GMT

Have I stumped you?

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Tobias_Hathorn — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 15:29:45 GMT

Kind of stumped, yes! I think there is a bug in FormIt - but we'll research it with the Dev team first. I found that I can work around the issue by scaling the texture in Revit from 1" x 1" to 24" x 24" - see attached screenshots for my results.

Note that I think the texture scaling in FormIt SHOULD read 24" x 24" instead of 1" x 1" and that's my suspicion of the bug - but as I said, we need to research it a bit. Thank you for sharing the file and the issue!

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

josh.goldstein — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 17:28:14 GMT

Hi Trevor,

Can you also provide us with the SketchUp model that was used to create this FormIt file?

Thanks,

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:26:35 GMT

Please, find attached SketchUp file.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:34:24 GMT

Sorry, I am having issues posting.

I will try again later. Sorry, for the delay.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

josh.goldstein — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 01:46:08 GMT

Hi Trevor,

We got your SketchUp file, thanks for sending it along.

Here's what's happening:

If you examine this material in SketchUp, you'll notice it is, in fact, defined with a size of 1" x 1":

This matches what FormIt shows for the material definition as well, and in both applications, you can draw a new rectangle and paint it with the material, and you'll see 1"x1" tiling of this texture.

Obviously, when looking at the geometry in question, this material/texture appears much larger. This is because the material has a per-face override in SketchUp. You can see this if you right-click one of the faces painted with this material, and look in the context menu for the option "Reset Position." This option generally means that someone has scaled, rotated, moved, or otherwise skewed the original definition of the material on this particular face.

Selecting this option gives you the small tiling you are seeing in Revit:

FormIt respects these "custom" texture overrides when importing SketchUp files, so that your FormIt materials in-canvas look exactly as they did in SketchUp. However, when we send the data to Revit, Revit unfortunately has no method of applying these custom overrides, so they are discarded, which is why you see the 1"x1" tiling when opening the file in Revit.

Instead of relying on the per-face override, you can try "Reset Position" in SketchUp as I show above, and then editing the actual material definition to match the size you expect, and paint that material without overrides onto any geometry that needs it. Then, you can open the SketchUp file in FormIt and convert to Revit, which should give you the result you're looking for. In general, you'll have better results if the texture definition is correctly scaled, instead of relying on the per-face overrides in SketchUp.

I hope this helps, and thanks for bringing it up. We'll add this information to our SketchUp-To-Revit blog post.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

AREINAROJAS — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 10:04:38 GMT

Hi all,

I have a problem with FormIt, I'm importing some objects from Skectchup to FormIt, then I'm assigning different materials and categories to the different elements and importing it into a Revit family and there I can see the materials as assigned into FormIt, but if I load the family into the model I can't see the materials anymore, how can I do?

Thank you so much

FormIt:

Revit Family:

Revit Model:

@josh.goldstein @Tobias_Hathorn

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

HeatherL011 — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 16:15:33 GMT

Hi AREINAROJAS,

What version of Revit are you using? We made some change to the more recent FormIt Converter that works with Revit 2021 and it may cause issues with transferring materials in former Revit versions and the FormIt Converter.

In FormIt, what categories are you assigning to the Groups? Are sub-groups assigned to different categories? And in Revit, what Family Category are you importing the FormIt mode into?

I was trying to recreate your issue, but I haven't been able to- I see materials coming across in Revit even when I load the Revit family containing the FormIt model into the Revit project. Could be that you don't have the Revit project view set to Realistic visual style?
Another thing you could try for trouble-shooting is to make the family "Shared" and then reload it into the Revit project.

Could you share the FormIt model of the piece of furniture? I can try to recreate it again on my computer.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

AREINAROJAS — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 14:28:59 GMT

Hi @HeatherL011

Thank you for your reply. Please find bellow my answers:

I'm using Revit 2020.2.

I'm assigning Furniture category to all the groups and sub-groups. And also in Revit I'm importing the FormIt file into a Furniture Revit family template.

I'm using the Realistic visual style in the family and in the project model.

All the families imported from FormIt are automatically "shared", is that anyway to avoid that? I prefer to have just the completed family into the Revit model

Attached you'll se the FormIt model

Thank you so much

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

HeatherL011 — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 21:18:50 GMT

Thanks for the answers- I'm looking into it. I see the issue, but I haven't figured out why its happening yet. I'll continue to look into it.

Re: Formit to Revit - How to assign materials?

HeatherL011 — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 18:41:21 GMT

It looks like materials coming from FormIt elements into Revit nested families are not able to correctly transfer their materials into the Revit Project environment. This may be because the underlying FormIt element, which has been imported into Revit, does not have a material parameter. I will log this issue and we will look into it.
In the mean time, you could import the FormIt model directly into the Revit project environment and group the families so that they stay together as one collection of elements.