Convert Templates Legacy to PBR Materials Automation?

[RGrandmaison]

Has anyone tried to make any automation to convert all the Legacy material assets in the existing templates into PBR material assets?

Seems like it might be a nice thing to have an option to do. I'd love to jettison the old materials, and I'm actually a bit puzzled as to why the latest versions of the templates still use so many legacy materials. Someone needs to do some updating.

Ideally some kind of automation for it would be wonderful, like a material mapping list that would allow one to see the current asset in one column, and then the one that is (automatically) applied to replace it next to it, but can be overridden by the user should one want to use a different asset.

[barthbradley]

You cannot convert Legacy Materials to PBRs.  

Read/Watch this: 

https://www.autodesk.com/autodesk-university/class/PBR-Materials-Revit-What-These-Materials-Mean-and...

[RGrandmaison]

That's not true- you can replace the appearance asset of any Legacy material with a PBR appearance asset. Doesn't that then make the revised material simply a PBR material??

[barthbradley]

What's not true?  Your question was about "converting" Legacy to PBR - not replacing a Material's Appearance Asset with another -- which is  possible.  

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/EN...

[RGrandmaison]

hahahaha...ok. I was a bit harsh when I said it wasn't true. 😉 The material is still the same in the model, EXCEPT that the appearance asset has now been replaced. SO, as I see it, the material has been converted by simply replacing the appearance asset. I guess we're splitting hairs on the term "converting".

I liken it to taking an internal combustion engine out of a car and inserting batteries and DC motors. The engine asset has been replaced and now the car has been converted into an electric vehicle. 🙂

So, one could take any of the templates, and simply swap out all the legacy appearance assets...seems like there would be an opportunity here for some dynamo automation...make a "replacement list" of existing appearance assets to be replaced by newer, PBR, ones. Kind of like the Layer Translator tool in AutoCAD...but for material appearance assets.

[RGrandmaison]

Granted, building a PBR material from scratch using one of the base templates would be a preferred way of working.

[lucdoucet_msdl]

@RGrandmaison 

There is a blog post by Kevin Sobon of Archilab that may be useful for swapping assets as they where written out from a revit project to an excel file.

You could therefor create a master file for searching and replacing existing names for new materials (that you would have to create of course).

I don’t recall if these dynamo nodes could read the material assets parameters. If so, that could be a starting point to converting legacy to PBR settings and automating the creation of new PBR assets.

You should post this request to the Revit API thread.

Good luck 

-luc