With the huge push for collaboration in Autodesk software, why do materials still have to be referenced into the projects? Revit families are embedded in the project, but when it comes to materials, we are always missing textures since they are only referenced into Revit and must be pathed to the same image in order for Revit to reference it from another computer. Wouldn't it be great if material textures could be shared flawlessly and stay embedded throughout the life and workflows of the Revit project? Problems you run into with the current method include:
1. In workshared models, materials can be created on one machine, but if the project is opened on another machine that doesn't have that image mapped, it shows up as a missing texture.
2. Receiving models for rendering purposes, the custom textures are often missing, meaning you have to manually remap them if you are able to get the texture images from a Finish spec sheet or otherwise.
3. Other Autodesk Products can't find the textures. Since Navisworks uses the same Autodesk Material Library, you get errors that it "Can't resolve external references" upon opening a project. (This includes pushing an NWD to BIM 360 Glue and opening a merged model in Navisworks.)
4. Working off the network. Since we can use Collaboration for Revit and Navisworks through BIM 360 Glue, you don't have to VPN to work from home or another location. This is a great workflow and keeps things running much faster, however, if the textures aren't embedded into the project, how do you reference the textures hosted on the shared server without first copying them to your local machine?
Even if there are a couple work-arounds, I would much rather spend my time modeling and rendering than remapping textures, copying jpeg's locally, or having to request the texture files upon receiving Revit models for rendering, animation, or VR purposes.
