Revit Materials Best practise

[Anonymous]

I have Three questions for you.

These questions have come about due to issues with custom texture/images file paths getting lost between machines on the same network. It stems from the management of an absolutely mammoth Material library.

What is the best practise for creating a material in Revit? Duplicate or Create New? Are there drawbacks or issues to either?

How do you store your Revit material/image textures? In sub folders or in one big folder? 

What method do you use to manage textures between projects? A specific folder that you place only the textures used in that project in? or a central company library of material images? 

[RSomppi]

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@Anonymous wrote:

What is the best practise for creating a material in Revit? Duplicate or Create New? Are there drawbacks or issues to either?

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There can be issues with duplicating. If not properly, changes to one that was duplicated will also change the duplicate and vise versa.

[syman2000]

Usually you can add custom render appearance path so you can copy those maps from one location to another.

As for creating new material, it is up to you what you want. Normally I would take OOTB material and customized it to fit what I want. If you want to create new, choose default>generic. It gives you more control and features.

For PBR material, use misc and choose the material to suit what you want to create. It has way more advance feature and will make the material create those 3d effect.

Also be watchful for these icon. If it is 0, it means the material is unique. If it has number figure that isn't 0, this means the material is used multiple times with different name. Most often if you want to keep multiple material, I would duplicate and then change as needed. Note when you add OOTB material to your project and modify it, it won't change the OOTB material.

[barthbradley]

Share Materials and Material Libraries...

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2019/ENU/Revit-C...

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the responses. Are there any issues you have experienced with images texture paths from folder paths not being found despite being on the same network with access to the same folder location? 

@syman2000 do you have subfolders in your render appearance link or is it a flat folder structure? We have the need to use material images to create bespoke finishes on most things within projects. So would you store images for those projects in a separate material folder specific to that project or in a central company library? 

@barthbradley Thanks for the link. I wonder if you have anything to add in relation to best practises for large scale management of images. I.e. separate project folders for images? separate ADSKLIB files for each project? Create a library of Material assets rather than Materials?

Thanks 

[syman2000]

I would add sub-folder as well.