Revit ini material paths dropping oiff

[Anonymous]

There's been a few posts regarding the dropping of the out-of-the-box (OOTB) material libraries dropping out of Revit.  I've reviewed them and still have a rather large problem.

I built and set up for all of our users (~145 users) a company specific Material library, mapped this in the Renderings set-up in the Options dialog this past March and all was great.  Our materials were set to the 2 OOTB options: AEC Materials and Autodesk Materials as well as our materials and our company material library.

The reivt.ini handles these 2 different ways:

OOTB is defined under "MaterialLibraryFiles=..\Data\Rendering"

Custom is defined under "AdditionalRenderAppearance Path=J:\Revit2017\Davis Materials Library"

Within in the last 2 weeks, we lost the path to all of the above when we open Revit.

The Revit.ini has changed where the custom material library path has disappeared

AND the OOTB path to the AEC Material and Autodesk Materials library is still there but these are not accessible in Revit.

When I re-path to our custom material library and restart Revit - all material libraries come back - including the OOTB material libraries.

I have attached screen shots of the "broken" ini file and the fixed ini file (Highlighted in blue and yellow)

I am curious to hear from Autodesk or someone who can explain what may have occurred across 145 users that this Revti.ini can be re-written to have caused this??

[MichaelWarwick7522]

Which ini file are you changing? The one in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\<product name and release> or the one in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\<product and release>\UserDataCache?

ProgramData will overwrite Users every so often.

[MichaelWarwick7522]

In answer to your actual question: what can have occured?

1. Update of Revit (eg. 2018.2) by IT or the desktop app, these cause user file to be updated from ProgramData version.

2. Mondays.

3. You had plans for the weekend.

[martinTstewart_Adsk]

I’m not able to tell what may have occurred to cause this just from the description.

Has that been an issue again since you re-pathed your custom material library?

Has the render path gone missing since?

If there was a typo or something Revit didn’t expect when that was pushed out, it might have just overwrote user’s ini with the template ini.(?)

There may be a group policy issue with IT that impacted this.

If that J: drive was unavailable for a time, that may have interfered.

There’s a lot to consider with Revit ini:   Several articles in help documentation: The Revit.ini File

Update User Settings Across an Organization

This is how it’s supposed to work as described in that article:

The next time a user starts the software, Revit compares UserDataCache\Revit.ini with the user profile version of the Revit.ini file. When it determines that the Update setting in the UserDataCache version is different than the Update setting in the user profile version (or it does not exist there), Revit copies the settings specified by the Update setting in UserDataCache\Revit.ini from that file to the user profile version of the Revit.ini file, overwriting previous values for those settings. Other values in the user profile version of the Revit.ini file are not changed.

As the BIM director, you likely are aware of all this.  So maybe it was a one-time fluke. If this is still occurring, please consider creating a support case at the Contact Support page.