It occurred to me that the new Physical Material shipping with 3ds max 2017 would be a better approach to materials compared to the Autodesk Material. The Physical Material is a Physically Based Render (PBR - no not that PBR hipsters) and is designed to work very well with the Autodesk Ray Tracer (ART) and is the shading model for materials in Stingray. This would kill many birds with one stone. Perhaps the dev team can nudge the Autodesk Material team in that direction. If I am not mistaken, the Autodesk material is based on the Mental Ray shading model and therefore harder to translate to all these separate platforms and renderers.
Thanks for taking the time to submit your idea. Unfortunately, this idea did not get the support of the community over the last 6 months and as such we will not be pursuing it at this time. Please feel free to rework (titles are really important) and resubmit this one down the road.
@Hugh_Compton I'm on the 3ds Max team. 3ds Max Interactive (Stingray) now comes with 3ds Max 2018. We are looking into improving this workflow with Revit. Would you mind reposting in the 3ds Max Ideas forum here? @mark_kauffman Vote it up if you want.
Just look at what is possible with https://enscape3d.com/ Enscape converts Revit's RPC trees an shrubs to higher quality ones. It recognises a grass material and makes it into realistic 3D grass.
I have tried Revit Live but gave up - the conversion time was unforgivable.
Surely a new group of materials could be added to Revit to aid the transition into real time animations / VR?