Improve Materials and Material Browser

[andrefiaschi]

Hello!

It is a fact that Material management in Revit is a big issue.

Here are some ideas:

1. Interface should be remade. It's chaotic. Focus on management. Try reducing pop-up windows everywhere. It should be quick. It looks like a patchwork.
2. Material shared parameters created by us should appear on the IDENTITY tab, not inside that little button in the corner that no one sees. Also, the native "Class" parameter should be available on Schedules, cause now it's pretty much useless.
3. Let us select more than one material and do things like choose the same pattern for them, change colours and so on.
4. Put autofill when typing into a Material parameter field (inside a family, for instance), so I can start typing something and then select what I want on the list.
5. Create more columns and filters on the Material list, so we can sort materials by Class and then Names, for instance. Filter them, group them. Let us choose the columns.
6. Create a way to MERGE materials. For example: If have triplicated materials that should be 1. I can select 2 of them, click MERGE and choose the one that I want to keep. All elements using those first 2 materials now receive the 3rd material. Simple.
   
   1. This would be very useful for fill patterns and line styles.
7. Create a warning for deleting a material that's in use and allow us to specify another material that will be applied to all elements using the deleted material, or I can choose to leave it empty <by category>.
   1. This would be very useful for fill patterns and line styles.
8. Let us choose patterns as we prefer. Let the background pattern be a Model one.
9. We should have more control of the textures. There are some tricks to control it but overall we have to accept whatever Revit does. At least create a way for us to set the starting point and angle of the texture on every surface, and lock it.
10. I get the idea behind this Appearance system but I never really use it. It is more annoying than useful, at least to me. Keeping the appearances organised is HUGE task.
    1. Let us use commas and other symbols on Appearance names.
    2. Make it quicker.
    3. Review interface. Reduce the amount of popup windows.
       
    4. Put Graphics and Appearance side by side maybe? 
11. Autodesk should have an online material database synchronized with all their software and we users and mainly companies could contribute to that. Not only with textures, but with proper detailed information (physical, thermal) about each material, that can be used later on schedules, analysis and quantities.

Bonus:

Hire me to have this kind of ideas and UX suggestions 🫶

Haha

Cheers! 😃

[EthanBLU97]

OK I've held my tough long enough.... I have worked in Revit for +10 years and one of the ugliest pain points is working with Material assets, In particular appearance assets. Why is it so slow, and ridiculously hard to rename/manage/edit/control materials and how they appear. This lack of control is now compounded and highlighted by better and better visualization tools (Enscape, Twinmotion, etc.). 

Even the smallest thing, like renaming appearance assets, 50% of the time doesn't work. I rename the asset, hit enter, and it reverts to the old asset name. I duplicate the asset, try renaming it, and it flips back to the old name. I try to search for a material to put it in my custom library, but my open custom library disappears once a search for a material in the material editor so I can't drag and drop this newly found material into my library! So many small and frustrating quirks that make me feel like Autodesk enjoys the suffering of its users....

Ultimately, creating a library of reusable appearance assets is particularly frustrating and soul numbing. Please, Please, Please, Autodesk... If you can do one thing. Please OVERHAUL the entire appearance asset system and allow us to easily organize, control, rename, appearance assets... quickly and easily, and not have to click into multiple tabs to change one simple thing.

[Simon_Weel]

All true. And there are MANY ideas covering this already. Paul Aubins idea is the best, IMO.

[EthanBLU97]

@Simon_Weel ... Thanks for the link!

I realize offer no real solutions to the multitude of problems like some more dedicated folks in this community, but I know any genuine attention given to this topic by Autodesk would easily find improvements!  

If Autodesk wants to hire me, I'll happily improve their expensive software I pay for! 😂

[ks2_wmb]

This is already on the roadmap for Revit 2029 (or thereabouts) - https://www.autodesk.com/blogs/aec/roadmap/revit-architecture-roadmap/?redirected=1

[andrefiaschi]

@ks2_wmb Revit 2029? 😂😂

Based on Revit 2025 updates this is coming on Revit 2050.

Sad.

[_dalewfd]

voted and agree with most points, except the last one. whatever time developers have would be better spent on a multitude of the other ideas that have been around for 10 years instead of rolling out a global material database that will never be able to satisfy everyone and, based on other autodesk content, will be butchered in any case.

other issues with the current material set up:

hatch patterns don't function with material libraries 

image file pathing issues which prevent shared cloud drives from being used to store asset images 

but at least this particular issue (the material browser) is 'on their radar'.

[Federico-Bellapianta]

Then mine Browser material is so slow to open, like 1 min or something. I can't waste my time like this when I have an exam in 14 days! Same problem occured with the 2024 Version! 
There is any fix to have it more faster atleast?

[ks2_wmb]

This week I started updating our materials library to integrate the 2019 PBR materials, and these were my biggest pain points:

• Allow selection of multiple materials and multiple assets at a time
  • Pressing "add asset to a custom library" individually for each asset sucks
• Need tool to bulk convert old-style assets to new PBR assets
  • Many manufacturers provide materials libraries through their own website or BIMsmith.  These libraries are all in the old generic asset style.  Rebuilding each of these manufacturer materials from scratch, copying over the colorway information, and entering the name sucks.
• Need tool to bulk edit material/asset values
  • When selecting multiple assets, match the behavior of the project browser.  Different values should read "<varies>", and aligned values should read their value.
• Need a "new material" dialog box (or dropdown) that asks us what kind of new material we want to create (generic, paint, wood, metal...)
  • For comparison, currently the only way to make a new "paint" type asset is to duplicate a paint asset from the asset library.
• Bulk rename support?  Please?
  • Again, this is mostly to fix long manufacturer naming conventions.
• I don't understand the difference between the attached asset browser and the pop-out asset browser.  I always use the pop-out asset browser.

Currently these issues prevent me from providing a stockpile of material asset libraries for my users.  Had the material editor interface been fixed in 2019 with the release of the PBR materials, I probably would have started this material upgrade process in our template years earlier.

[piotr_beltowski]

Materials (texture) viewport display in revit is so slow that I would consider to switch to different program. I started with revit in 2008 and that is just a shame that after almost 20 years it is still so weak. 

When i am using texture 2k x 2k the viewport is unusable, i have to vait for every scroll ( with rtx 3060)

Why skethup handles that so well and revit doasn't ? Autodesk team, do we have to wait another 10 version to fix this ?

[dw_greyblock]

+1 to multi selecting materials/assets and being able to then perform (limited) functions in bulk. 

Adding appearance assets and materials to a library for instance is incredibly painful. Let's say I have a project, I've created dozens of materials, I've created even more appearance assets that all look great, and now I want to save the materials and assets into a library for future use. I should be able to multi select everything I want, and then either drag or 'right-click>add to...' in order to save them into a library. Right now the only way to add things into a library is one by one. Every single material and every single asset, one. at. a. time.