Currently in order to control the position/orientation of a material on an element, the material needs to have a surface pattern so that you can tab-select the pattern and move/rotate it. Unfortunately Revit does not allow you to apply linear or angular dimensions to the pattern and apply parameters to them. So we cannot parametrically control material position/orientation in a family. Being forced to apply surface patterns to a material is also pretty limiting since not all materials need surface patterns and in order to control those materials we have to temporarily apply a pattern, make our changes, and then remove the pattern - so silly.
I propose adding a new "Material Positioning" tool. To us it, you select the tool from the toolbar (maybe near the "split surface" tool), then select a surface. That would apply a "control widget" to the surface that may look like an X/Y coordinate symbol. That widget would represent the material texture origin and orientation and would not be plottable (just like reference lines/planes). Then we should be able to apply linear/angular dimensions to the widget relative to nearby geometry and/or reference lines and apply parameters to those dimensions just like we do with other geometry. This would give us complete control of the texture origin location and rotation (maybe even scale?). It would also mean that we could modify the texture orientation without having to apply a surface pattern!
This would be a very useful tool for visualization. For example, doors usually are built so that the wood grain on the door panel runs parallel to the longest panel dimension. If the panel is wider than it is tall, then the grain typically runs horizontally. Alternately if the panel is taller than it is wide then the grain is typically set to run vertically. Currently there is no good way to set this type of behavior in a revit family.
Current workarounds are:
- Create two versions of the door panel geometry with the exact same geometry in the exact same place, but one with horizontal texture and the other with vertical texture. They would also need to have separate visibility on/off parameters applied to them. Then you would need to use parameter formulas to control the visibility of the geometry to get the behavior you're looking for in the family. This means you can use a single material parameter for both the vertical and horizontal versions, but having the extra geometry makes the family harder to edit and "heavier" thus slowing down Revit.
- Create two versions of the same material; one with horizontal orientation and the other with vertical orientation and expect the user to change the material manually. Having duplicate materials in revit also slows it down.
