Material Library Issue???

[RGrandmaison]

Greetings everyone. I've got a problem that seems to be happening now with Revit 2021. Not sure when it started or what I may have done to cause it, but it seems to be connected to my material library in some way.

When opening the Materials manager, most material texture icons will not load, or take a very long time to do so, and my computer's CPU goes into overdrive for some reason. Not sure if this is a missing paths situation, or if it's a missing library materials- though I do seem to have all the RVT 2021 material libraries and textures in my C drive in the proper location.

Any suggestions as to what I might want to do to remedy this ugly condition???

[barthbradley]

Hoping it's fixed in 2022.  Fingers crossed.  

[Lance.Coffey · Accepted solution]

This issue should now be resolved in Revit 2021.1.3 & Revit 2022

[mmcanulty]

sorry to revive the dead... but this issue is not resolved in Revit 2022.

[stephanie.zhouQE5VB]

Hi, Mmcanulty

Thank you for reporting this Material Library issue. Would you mind send me the test file and reproduced steps? So we could take a look at this issue?

[stephanie.zhouQE5VB]

Thank you all for reporting this Material Library issue. We have researched on the reported issue and be able to reproduced it. This issue has been logged in our backlog. We will keep you updated.

[cbeegle]

I have the same issue. My computer runs so hard revit crashes sometimes. right when I select material browser, BOOM the fans kick on and start whistling its a major problem and I  want to know who isnt having thw problem.

[Lance.Coffey]

If you are seeing these symptoms (slow performance when working in Materials dialog with Revit 2021.1.3 or later), see the following article (on a different issue, that causes similar behavior): Slowly refreshing material thumbnails while opening the material browser in Revit 2021.1.3 or later 

Current workaround (as noted in article above) is to change Environment from Grid Light to Plaza, Snowfield, or Warm Light.

[mmcanulty]

Lance,

Thank you for the tips, but following that link can change the material appearance quite drastically. See below

I am using out of the box asphalt, which has the Bump set (of course...),  if I change the environment to plaza, I get blue asphalt.  That does not help with using the materials.

I am a bit puzzled why there is an issue for multiple years that gets worse...I should not be hearing the fan from my CPU kicking having the material browser open.

The solution workaround you linked to does not seem viable as many projects could have tens to hundreds of materials to change.

Revit throws a warning flag if we use the legacy materials...but now we can't use the new materials...

[Lance.Coffey]

Thank you for the question @mmcanulty!

This can be a bit tricky to parse out. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear in my last post, but this isn't an issue which has been ongoing for multiple years. There are two issues here, with similar symptom/behavior.

First issue (reported towards the end of 2020 and resolved in Revit 2021.1.3 and Revit 2022): Slowly refreshing material thumbnails while opening the material browser in Revit 2021

This issue was related to a problem in reading material thumbnails created when opening the material dialog (leading to heavy CPU usage as thumbnails are re-created each time the dialog was opened). This appears to be related to the Windows permissions as users found that running Revit with elevated permissions was a workaround for this behavior.

Second issue (which you reported in March 2022 and is currently being investigated): Slowly refreshing material thumbnails while opening the material browser in Revit 2021.1.3 or later

This issue affects the creation of material thumbnails for certain materials (with a combination of three conditions, listed in the article above) where the processing gets hung up leading to heavy CPU usage each time the materials dialog is opened.

Regarding the change in material appearance: This only affects the preview of the material in the material dialog. This does not change the appearance of materials within the model. I've added a note to the article to clarify this point.

Regarding the Asphalt material, this material shouldn’t be affected by the issue as the "Asphalt – Dark Grey" asset is an Opaque material, and this issue affects Layered materials (such as metallic paint, carbon fiber, granite…) to see if a material is using a layered asset, check the Material Asset Browser)

Here are some layered material assets:

Please let me know if you have any further questions on this.

[urkidding]

I am having the same issue right now. and the color wont show in enscape. 

[rnorrish]

This is beyond frustrating. I'm sure I'm not the only one that can spend a majority of a day doing what could be an hours work due to slow loading of material assets, throw in a crash or two ( always save before editing materials!)

Has anyone had success with a high end GPU to solve this?

I have a very quick CPU with 64Gb RAM but my 6gb GPU may lack. Multicore CPU for Revit would solve alot of these issues if it is CPU driven