Thanks in advance! The issue that we are having is that in Revit 2020 the material preview images are extremely slow to update. If the material browser is left sitting open, eventually all the preview images update but it takes some time (probably 7-10 minutes). This issue became apparent after we updated all of our material assets to the new assets (the new assets removed the yellow "!" in the corner of the material preview). The weird thing is that only some of the updated materials are misbehaving. At this point I think we've exhausted every solution we could come up with.
Efforts to this point are as follows:
-Updated to R2020.1 (newest release)
-Turned off Hardware Acceleration (Revit Options)
-Removed/refreshed UIState.dat file
-Removed/refreshed MaterialUIConfig.xml file
-Changing out the assets again (still to the new assets)
-Removed/Deleted all "Old" material library versions from Windows (did this after repairing the libraries had no effect)
-Delete all materials except 4 (2 problem materials and 2 working materials)...still same issue
-We have under 50 materials in our library so coupled with the test above, I don't see this as an issue
The only thing I've found to resolve this is to change the material assets back to the "old" assets...once this is done the material browser preview images open immediately.
System:
-Windows 10
-Revit 2020.1
have you try to update your graphics card driver to the latest and see if helps. thanks
Hi @andrew.freng ,
My name is Mark, I am a Revit support specialist and I would like to help you with your question. First I should ask if the request from @ennujozlagam was helpful. If so, please hit "Accept Solution".
If not, I would like you to try the following:
Please let me know if this is helpful!
Hi @andrew.freng ,
Thanks for the update. I'd like you to try the following also:
Change the render quality of the preview | Click the drop-down arrow next to the swatch image, click Render Settings, and select Draft Quality or Production Quality. |
Change the appearance properties | Change property values displayed on this tab as desired. The properties available vary depending on the type of material. See Render Appearance Properties.
Note: The appearance properties can affect the amount of time required to render an image. (Not necessarily specific to the preview images, but may help). See Render Performance and Materials.
|
If these don't help. I will ask that you share your file and materials in a private link (if you are ok with that) so I can try to replicate it on my end!
Hi @andrew.freng ,
I have been able to duplicate your issue on multiple machines on my end. I have alerted our development team for investigation. I will update you as soon as I get a response from our team. Thank you for your patience while we work through this!
Hi @andrew.freng ,
I have gotten some feedback from our team.
It looks as though the sheer size and complexity of this file is taxing your (and my) hardware. I hope this is helpful.
Please let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help!
Hi @andrew.freng . In response to the above comment, I have gotten further comment from our development team after examining the behavior of my machine (which seemed to match yours while working with the file you supplied). The observed behavior is considered "as designed" per our current testing result using my machine. The mechanism here is that whenever a user clicks on a material, its thumbnail will be generated in the material browser as a high priority in the sequence. The lower priority will be populated in order after the selected materials displayed on the screen. And so on until all of the previews are populated.
Essentially, beefing up your machine will produce these images for you more quickly (see above specs from the machine our team tested this on)!
Mark,
The Xeon CPU you mentioned has 12 cores/24 threads.
Were the material preview images being rendered by CPU or GPU for your testing?
What I've read about rendering in Revit indicates it's done by the CPU, and it can use up to 16 cores for that. If that's the case, spending a lot on a video card won't help with that particular issue. It does help keep a high frame rate when you zoom, rotate, pan, or move around your model, so a good GPU is still important. If you read system recommendations from ADSK or places like Puget Systems, you want a CPU with the best single-core performance possible for most of what Revit does and up to 16 cores for certain operations. i.e. a Ryzen 9-3950X.
I realize ADSK wants to drive the use of cloud credits and purchases of partner software like Unity, but it would be really nice of them to implement GPU-based rendering in all of the parts of Revit that make the production of the model go more smoothly. Waiting a minute or more for material previews to appear every time you open that browser isn't good.
Autodesk's list of Multi-threaded processes in Revit 2017: (I can't find any updates to this list by ADSK since Aug. 14, 2018)
@mark.ryanV3F5AThanks again for your assistance with this and sorry for not replying sooner (I never received any correspondence from the forum alerting me to any reply). I'm at a loss on this issue and at this point we are moving past as it's a minor inconvenience at most. No solutions have been accepted at this point as we are still able to reproduce this issue on many different computers so this is clearly still an issue (including computers w/ the latest and greatest hardware).