Embed Material Textures

[Anonymous]

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. 

[leo3UEEM]

Make this change already autodesk !!!!

[dw_greyblock]

The official Revit cloud worksharing best practices says to save non-Revit files into the BIM360/Cloud folder and link via Desktop Connector. Makes sense, so we have all our project related files (dwgs, PDFs, etc.) saved in the cloud folder.

But now we have to create a project materials folder somewhere completely separate, potentially using a third party program, just to save and store the material images? Seems like madness.

Surely if all users have access to a shared path there must be a way for the material image to be found. Then again, 7 years without any improvement so maybe not... 

[wobrien]

Why has this not been addressed after seven years of requests? We should not have to jump through hoops to get render appearances synced. Not to mention how much more difficult it can get when doing this across multiple offices and consultants when using ACC! It seems like a no-brainer to allow custom material assets to be embedded in the project.

Each year's releases feel increasingly stale in innovation and I guarantee you this one would satisfy a lot of people. You pushed us towards a subscription model so start grabbing some of the low-hanging-fruit to help justify the pricing!

[tailosimpson]

This is a huge problem in house if work shared models are being used and we want a shared renderable model between users.  We are using Enscape for our rendering.  My Revit is showing unresolved paths to materials that my colleague has set up.  I can re-path all the materials but the path doesn't 'stick'.  Our materials are all on a shared network we both have access to. I feel like I'm missing something here... Such a basic function to have materials function between users on work shared files...  

[AmbientePRO]

Hello in this case I would advise to use Enscape materials ensuring that
escape is reading the texture from a dedicated folder in your network for
each project. That has worked we'll for us although not a solution for the
original problem of this thread. I hope this helps.

Chris.

[ks2_wmb]

Non-embedded raster images in appearance assets makes the transfer of materials between machines hard.  BIMsmith (who specializes in shipping materials in bulk to users) had to make a tutorial about how to re-link materials in bulk.

To mitigate file size bloat from embedded images... we just need better tools to thin our materials library.

• Merging materials would be nice.  A merge tool is requested in this idea.
• Many materials are unpurgeable because they're loaded into a family.  The loaded family doesn't use the nested materials, but they're still unpurgeable anyway.  More on recursive purge in this idea.

[cmacdonaldPPWN6]

The way materials currently work in Revit, this would completely nuke file sizes. Especially with new users, they would just build up endless 4k, 8k textures and syncing would go on forever. There is already too much included in the project files. It's easy to set an additional appearance path and just transfer all you textures in a folder. Revit is not SketchUp, there is already too much in the project files.

[amalandfx]

I don't agree that setting an additional appearance path can be described as "easy". Easy also needs to be intuitive, and this is not intuitive.

I agree, there does need to be safeguards against somebody blowing up the file size with huge texture images, or way too many texture images that aren't being actively used. That is a common issue with embedded SketchUp materials so learning from that bad situation is a good idea, but zero image embedding is restricting collaboration.

Some ideas:

1. Could be a limit to the file size allowed for embedded material images.
2. Could be a special sharable file format to embed the materials before sharing the file, that prompts the recipient to copy all those applicable image files to their own material folder automatically.

[kostremEEC7J]

Seems silly I can't upload a Revit model with a satellite image overlaying the topography into ACC for field staff to reference.

[rdefrancoZHD7B]

 Not a big deal to remap image files in the model, but we should be able to embed an image map into a family- what good is making say a custom appliance and not being able to associate the proper material with it.