Materials, Material Assets, Related Questions.

[payingtoomuch]

Cleaning up our material "library".

We have a lot of half baked materials..... some with necessary modifications.

Big question is if there is a way to know what material asset was originally assigned to a material that is currently in the library?

I would like to be able to compare the original asset attributes to the material attributes so I can decide if it's safe to reassign the default assets and kind of start over clean.

[payingtoomuch]

Also. Is there a way to duplicate or copy the "Appearance Library" asset folder? I basically want to create a copy of this folder, rename it and edit out all the stuff I don't anticipate using.... while maintaining the existing categories and functionality.

[RDAOU · Accepted solution]

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@payingtoomuch wrote:

Cleaning up our material "library".

We have a lot of half baked materials..... some with necessary modifications.

Big question is if there is a way to know what material asset was originally assigned to a material that is currently in the library?

I would like to be able to compare the original asset attributes to the material attributes so I can decide if it's safe to reassign the default assets and kind of start over clean.

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@payingtoomuch 

If you what you mean by material assets in the library as in the .adsklib file, I do not think so...you need to load that into a blank material free project. Then you can

• either go through them one by one in the Material editor in Revit
• OR use some 3rd party app like pyRevit (not sure if it has this feature though you got to test it its free)
• Or use Dynamo which can retrieve
  1. all material loaded into the project,
  2. Get their assets
  3. Get their Render appearance image and the path where that image is saved
  4. ...etc

You can then write that to an excel and manage it accordingly

[payingtoomuch]

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@RDAOU wrote:

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@payingtoomuch wrote:

Cleaning up our material "library".

We have a lot of half baked materials..... some with necessary modifications.

Big question is if there is a way to know what material asset was originally assigned to a material that is currently in the library?

I would like to be able to compare the original asset attributes to the material attributes so I can decide if it's safe to reassign the default assets and kind of start over clean.

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@payingtoomuch 

If you what you mean by material assets in the library as in the .adsklib file, I do not think so Yes, this is what I mean. Thanks for the no can do answer....!...you need to load that into a blank material free project. 

Then you can

• either go through them one by one in the Material editor in Revit. Well, this is probably not an option being as we have probably 35,000 must have materials right now (:.
• OR use some 3rd party app like pyRevit (not sure if it has this feature though you got to test it its free). I toyed with that for awhile a few years back. Interesting stuff but I have bigger fish to fry right now...... like learning actual revit!
• Or use Dynamo which can retrieve
  1. all material loaded into the project,
  2. Get their assets
  3. Get their Render appearance image and the path where that image is saved
  4. ...etc
  5. This would be helpful for sure! Have also looked into Dynamo a little in the past but decided to not go there at the moment. The time MIGHT be getting nearer however!

You can then write that to an excel and manage it accordingly

I'm kind of thinking for now the best approach might be just to purge out ALL the materials I'm not currently using in the project I'm working on that, ultimately will become the template. Then just start with a clean template and load in from a newly created and slimmed down .adsklib material asset library.... or possibly just use the default material asset library for a newly created custom & slimmed down material library. Decisions, decisions. Would like to get our materials down to 34,000 max!

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