Materials In Revit

[Anonymous]

For my Capstone Project I am designing a residential community. For the apartments I am doing three different material schemes. I would create my own materials and use jpeg images in my project. I would do the same when I would make a component and load it into the project. I did a lot of this over weekend, and then today I noticed my materials in my components were not appearing the same way in my project when modeling them in their family.

Is there a reason why my project would change the material, even though it is assigned one in the family? Everytime I would re load the componenet with the right materials it does not change in the project. For example I used a wood material on a countertop, and in the componenet family it appears correct but when I load it into revit (overriding exisitng) it is white. 

Also, when I would edit a material in the project, like the orientation of a flooring material, it change the material of a countertop of a componenet I modeled and loaded in. Any ideas on why this would happen?

Thanks for any insight. 

[rodrigo.bezerra]

Hi,

I'm assuming that you're making and loading Revit native families. That said, here's some thoughts:

1 - Try to set parameters to the subcategories inside your families and then edit and apply your materials through the main model. So you avoid ovewrite your materials accidentaly. Focus in build, then in rendering;

2 - I always regret using custom textures to create or edit a material. The built in libraries are huge (both AEC and Autodesk). My suggestion is load the materials that are close to what you want and then edit them until you get what you need (without changing the textures). For example, if you need a wood texture that's more red than the one in the library, you can use the tint to change the tone without editing the original texture map. Remember to always duplicate the materials and assets before start editing. You don't wanna lose your originals;

3 - Before doing any changes to a texture map (the sample size, for example), you rather check the "Link Transform" setting (pic below)

That done, you may now change the texture aligment to match your surface patterns (pic below)

4 - You didn't ask, but here's an advice for lighting fixtures: group them while you're modeling, so you can turn the groups on and off accoording to the scenes you want. You REALLY don't want Revit to calculate hundreds of light sources inside your building if you're rendering a exterior scene.

Hope it helps.

Regards

[Anonymous]

"I always regret using custom textures to create or edit a material. The built in libraries are huge"

95% of the "built-in" textures are useless if you want a presentation rendering.

[rodrigo.bezerra]

Well pointed, Revit_LT, but if I want a profissional presentation rendering to close a deal, I guess I won't even do it in Revit considering that 3ds do it much better. For an academic presentation I think it's quite enough.

And, as I said, none of the materials are "done". You gotta do some serious editing to improve them. And from my earlier experiences, custom textures don't solve the problem either, since Revit's mental ray is quite limited in comparison even with 3ds mental ray.

Bottom line is your rendering will be as good as your modeling and the amount of time you can dedicate to edit the textures.

Regards

[chrisplyler]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Is there a reason why my project would change the material, even though it is assigned one in the family?

---

Let's say you've got a material in a family named "Steel." And it's configured with certain properties to make it look the way you want it to look. When you load the family into a project, any materials in the family that are not already in the project get added to the project. But any materials in the family for which there is already a material in the project of the same name will not get overwritten. So your Steel material will become the Steel material that was already in the project, which might be configured with entirely different properties.

So make sure any custom materials you define in a family have a unique name, or instead just use subcategories and assign materials in the project.

[Anonymous]

Basically you just need to use higher resolution image/textures than is

included with the Revit download. Especially to avoid tiling. But a lot

of stock textures look fine tiled also. I would change my prior statement

to: 20% or the stock textures are usable for presentation. The rest are

suitable for construction design rendering. And construction design is

what Revit is primarily intended for anyway.

[rodrigo.bezerra]

I had this one time when I made some custom materials with custom textures.
I did everything right, the materials looking awesome when viewing the
model on realistic mode... But the render never found the images to apply.
I checked and rechecked. All links pointing to right files. Then I got
pissed and from this day on never used custom images again.

But, and this is important, I never did a professional presentation. Only
academic or preliminary rendering for preview. My firm do all professional
render out of the office with other firms that uses 3ds.

[Anonymous]

"never used custom images again"

Well dealing with the Revit Content images is no better either.

You have to understand how to prepare images for rendering

with MentalRay. You actually have to use Photoshop to setup

the images for MentalRay rendering. Here is a house I rendered

with only Revit. Notice how the bricks look. So it certainly can

be done.

[rodrigo.bezerra]

Indeed the bricks look amazing. How did you set the texture to render?

This occasion I mentioned, when rendering I got the message "cound'n find texture.jpeg (or png, or bmp, whatever) although it appears right when shading.

[Anonymous]

"How did you set the texture to render?"

It's a higher resolution image to start with. And then

with Photoshop, or a program like it, take some of 

the gamma out of the image and increase the contrast

slightly, as well as take some of the brightness out.

Also don't forget, if the image is too close or too far

away in the view, it won't look right either.

Use the default image exposure controls in Revit rendering,

you do that part with Photoshop. And be sure you have

the precision and smoothness all the way on 10, that's

what takes so long to render and makes it look good.