Materials based filters

[peter_vanorshoven]

It is essential that filters get more extended, for instance we need to be able to filter  (and thus color in) elements based on the materials it contains:

ability to color all floors that contain concrete in red, all ceilings that contain a certain insulation material in green, and so on... Too many times, in order to make clear plans for the constructor, we need to indicate where he has to use a certain material, and now this is far to complex to achieve. If you don't search yourself each and every family, or perhaps add a manual parameter, it is almost impossible. And I am convinced Revit is NOT MEANT to be driven by manually filled in parameter...

[mark.silcock]

Would be great to be able to control the materials in our model by using our filers.

Typically in an MEP model we will give lots of different systems different appearances adding the option of materials to this function would be a great help.

An area which is time consuming is getting the right materials on pipework where you may have 3 or 4 different types of pipes in the model.

Materials at objects style level doesn't work for this need, also at system level does not work as it assigns that material to everything connected to the system.

I know rendering isn't a top priority for engineers but we do sometimes like to make our creations look pretty!

[Anonymous]

It will be useful you if can filter elements and its materials

[jkidder]

It would be especially nice to use a filter to change what material is used! It would be helpful for quick iterations (what if this is red vs blue), getting elements like exposed structural steel and ducts to render correctly (right now other programs have to be used) and creating "chipboard" style renderings (currently this is doable with windows as openings, and modifying phase overrides, but then it has to be reset) 

[mark.silcock]

Just thought I would add to this as we have been trialling Enscape for creating real time renders / VR and assigning materials to pipes is a problem we have not found a suitable workaround. System level doesn't work, Object styles doesn't work, pipe segment materials dont work. we can use phases but thats a lot of work. Please just add materials to filters!

[troels.olsen]

Yes! Was just about to post a similar wish. For floors, we can filter on "Structural Material". But it would be misleading to set the carpet layer to be a structural material (and might cause other issues..), just to be able to filter on material layer(s) in the object.

Much needed for floor plans, facade and other situations where we want to show materials intelligently.

[Pete_S11_Architecture_Ltd]

Dear Revit Gods,

Filter by material would be amazingly useful!

Currently, we break a wall down to external cladding, structure and dry-lining in order to filter each element.

Works great on our drawing packages, however, requires lots of wall joining at the start (also custom door and window families with voids)

[peter_vanorshoven]

I imagine hou doing so, but wouldn’t it be great to colour all walls with rigid insulation red, and all floors with an acoustical insulation in it, red? Indeed you can break down everything, but imagine doing this the day before the client asks for a change...
A filter would help us visually control whether everything is selected correctly and on the right place...

[PeterKnight]

It would be especially helpful to be able to filter based on internal and external sides of the wall and the materials assigned to those sides.

We want to be able to check our A side and B side of walls - to ensure the correct build-up is on the desired side. 

Being able to select materials through view filtering would be a good step towards achieving this.

[Anonymous]

I support this, it would be a useful ability to have via the API. Perhaps just as a filter to the FilteredElementCollector?

[peter_vanorshoven]

Perhaps, we could formulate this differently, to help engineers at Autodesk solve the problem of programming this...

Could you allow an "In view override material display"? Now we can tell an element to display differently, we can tell a category to display differently, and in specific, we can have them with a rough, medium or fine display. So can we have the same for a material?

Please…???

[Anonymous]

I second the notion of being able to override materials on a view by view basis. Working in Germany (and I'm sure other nations are similar) we have to differentiate elements by material/trade (Wood, Concrete, etc.) constantly. This means that all of our walls, floors, roofs, have to be broken up into different layers in order to control their line weights, cut patterns, etc. for different drawing scales, trades, and so on.

Either another tab in the Visibility/Graphics dialogue, or at the very least, ability to override materials by filter. I could see this as having great potential - being able to see/highlight/isolate all insulation, wood, concrete, at once in 3D, controlling linestyles of "0" thickness layers such as waterproofing to name a few. This without the headache of using parts - which by the way do not work when floors' and roofs' are modified by sub element - leaving us to choose from the lesser of two evils.

I get how this could be tricky in terms of hierarchy, but please make it happen.

[Anonymous]

YES PLEASE add the ability to control graphic overrides of materials by view (i.e. color-coding based on material) via filters!

[patrik.krchnak6Q4ZY]

I am sure someone will find a shortfall in this workaround but it did the job for me. 

1. Put something in "Mark" in Material Identity

2. Create "Multi-Category Material Takeoff" Schedule with "Material:Mark" field

3.Open your view (Where you want to override items) and the Material schedule 

4.Select the appropriate line in your Material schedule. This will highlight the elements in your model (Visible in your other opened view)

5. Save the selection (Under manage tab)

6. Go back to your view/s and add filter. Here you should have an option of "selection filter" which can be overridden as any other filter.

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the suggestion 🙂 it's definitely not a bad idea!

I would want the ability to select by applied material programmatically (such as a Dynamo or C# script). Something in a similar manner to a FilteredElementCollector.

[lionel.kai]

@patrik.krchnak6Q4ZY Also, the problem with selection-based filters is that they're not "live" (i.e. if the elements are changed, or new elements added, you have to update the selection manually).

[patrik.krchnak6Q4ZY]

@lionel.kai that's true but it was only a workaround suggestion and not a long term solution. Updating the selection is also not a big deal since you just repeat step 4 and step 5 while saving the selection with the same name (replacing the old selection filter) which updates the filters in relevant views automatically. 

[Anonymous]

In the VV window for the view;

It's mostly needed to be able to create filters and be able to override the Material of the filter selection.

[There is an override for "visibility/ projection/cut /haftone..only] but there is no override for Material.

This takes a lot of workarounds to take out.

I had a lot of cases that let me need this like for example reviewing the assigned materials especially when the material parameter cannot appear in the schedule. I do integrate between Revit and Enscape so I need to adjust Materials all the time and make reviews, models are large and categories and elements are numerous so a filterizing way should be there to help saving time...…..etc

[timlove]

Materials are not just a visual thing, there can be a lot of other information in them.  You can use object styles if you would like to have a category look a certain way.

How we handle this is to have materials assigned by object styles or a shared material parameter (we have several).  If you use the shared parameters you can create schedules that list them and make bulk changes possible.   Using certain tools you can even export to a spreadsheet, make changes, then bring the changes back into Revit.

[Anonymous]

This is not what I am in need of 🙂

I don't want to assign Material.....I want to visualize my elements in the view and review the assigned materials by visualizing each group of Materials by a color override for example.....to facilitate distinguishing the odd elements...

For that I suggested the [Material Visual screen similar to the workshare screen] also.

Object styles works for the whole category...

Also, about the spreadsheets, schedules….etc 😄 of course I know...but this is not my target...I work on another task related to visualization that requires other accelerating tools.

🙂

[Anonymous]

This would be a HUGE help. In projects where we want to show a lot of different objects grouped together by a specific parameter, the filters come in handy but are limited to just the assigning different surface patterns. if you could assign different materials to each of the filters, it would make the filter feature way more useful.