Linking to material and pattern folders

[Anonymous]

For texture and pattern files there is an issue with the file paths Revit is able to link to. There has been a discussion in the C4R and BIM360 Team forums and it was suggested I post this here as an idea. Example: This is what the file path looks like when texture file is stored in Google drive with the NEW sync client. The file path is the same for all users as it does not contain the username and the drive letter is consistently named G:.

I took the same texture file, uploaded it to BIM360 then went back to the material browser to select the texture file I uploaded to BIM360.

It appears at first that I'm selecting the BIM360 cloud drive folder, but once selected, the file path of the texture file points to the local username path. So now you open that same work shared Revit file and the texture will show as missing because the file path is broken.

Revit team/BIM 360 Team/C4R team - please change that. I think it is imperative that all file paths inside Revit can point to a user independent cloud drive. This means changing the default location of the desktop connector to something like google does it (without the username in the file path) and/or the ability to directly link to a BIM360 Team folder inside Revit. If Google can do it, so can you.

Marc

[mikel_martin]

In Revit 2018.2 the "cloud path" is displayed and used for file resolution. The local user path is not used in Revit 2018.2

At this point there is a technical limitation which prevents us from changing the local cache to a non-user directory.
The reason that Desktop Connector can not behave the same way that the "Google Sync" tool does is because it is not a sync tool. It is virtual file system which shows you all the data in the cloud without the need to download it. Desktop Connector does not download data until opened, which is critical to many customers because of the size of data and frequency of updates. The technology within the OS that is being used to make this work, can only work within the user directory to ensure the security of the operating system. Unless this changes within the OS there is no ability to make the change you have requested.

But if you are using Revit 2018.2 with Desktop Connector you should get the behavior that you are looking for.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mikel;

Your statement is not correct for Revit texture and pattern files - they reference the local user path.

The google file stream client (I guess I should have not called it a sync client) only shows the cloud stored files only until you decide you want to make a file "locally" available. But Google does not use the username in the file path, so if Google can do it in the OS, why can't ADSK? Google's file path is always G:\MyDrive so it is currently the only solution that works and does not break any file links for patterns and textures. Just to clarify, I'm talking about the NEW filestream client that is only available for GSuite customers. The "old" Google Drive Sync client behaves the same way your desktop connector does and hence breaks the links. The desktop connector does not work because inside Revit I cannot point to the cloud drive, which was confirmed by someone in my forum post. So when I use the local file path which injects the username, the link is broken again the next time another user opens the Revit file.

Marc

[mikel_martin]

I will have to look into the Texture and Pattern files and why they are not using the cloud path. It was my understanding that they should be.

I suspect that even Google is putting files in the user profile directory but are also creating a mapped drive to that location. We looked into doing this as well but thought it might be a bad idea to rely on that working across multiple machines and users across different environments and companies. Because you could never be sure if every user had that drive letter available. There were also some technical issue which we may have been able to overcome but we abandoned trying to solve because of the above reasons.

Like I said i will look into why Pattern and Texture files are not working the same was as the rest.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mikel;

Yes - if we could used the cloud drive that would be ideal. That way we could store all pattern and texture files as well as any families in a separate project on Team 360 that everyone could have access to and link from. 

On the google end, I just checked and it does not appear they're storing any files inside the user folder, but some app data is stored there.

[senglychau]

It would be good to have this resolved. A360 had taken us back a step in term of rendering straight out of Revit.