The Ultimate Revit Custom Material Marathon - Free Live Webinar

I  am excited to be curating a FREE live webinar hosted by Novedge on August 6th!

When thinking of topics I realized my last three posts had to do with materials in some way.  So I thought I would talk about custom materials, sharing materials, cloud rendering with materials... etc...

Within the hour long webinar I will show you how to find your own custom texture maps, create bump maps, and create custom materials.  Then, I will show you how to manipulate those materials and get some awesome rendering results.   Finally, I will break into some material management techniques (similar to this recent post).  Sounds cool?  Sign up below!

Click her to WATCH the Webinar now...

SAuBIM - Code Calcs now Available for Revit 2015!

Harry and I have finally released an install for SAuBIM and Revit 2015...

For those of you who are not familiar with SAuBIM, click here for my launch post from last year...

Here is a little run-down...

I took a quick detour away from BIM After Dark after reaching out to Harry from Boost Your BIM for some help updating SAuBIM.  Harry was excited to help make SAuBIM an add-in within Revit 2013 and Revit 2014.  He was awesome to work with and I think we created an extremely useful tool.

The first version of SAuBIM was released in May of 2011 and looked to connect a calculated parameter with a room tag in order to create Code Compliance and Egress plans quickly.  Unfortunately, the API for Revit 2012 did not allow a few things to happen so the program had to open and close Revit a few times during the process.  Not any more!!

SAuBIM Version 2.0 is a fully integrated add-in that will semi-automatically update your occupant load tags with the click of a button.  Check out the video here...

Purchase SAuBIM for Revit 13, 14, and 15 now!!

Revit Material Management Tips and Tricks

I have been getting many questions about different aspects of managing materials in Revit.  I thought it would be valuable to wrap a bunch of my material management techniques into a post here on the blog.  I also dug through the archives and pulled up some old posts (warning, some videos may be "pre-ribbon"!!):


Here is a good one from July 2009 (more material creation than management):

Tutorial - Families and Materials

While I was away from the blog and digging my face into the LEED reference guide I received a lot of emails. There were a few emails that were very alike and I would like to address the issue. It was very hard for me to think of a way to explain the answer in an email so I did it The Revit Kid.com! way with a nice easy to follow video.

The question had to do with conflicts between family materials and project materials.

Create Your Own Material Libraries in Revit

Beyond actually creating custom materials this would be the number one question I get when it comes to material management.  Here is the scenario:

I have a project that I have created a bunch of new materials (or modified a bunch of defaults ones).  I tweaked and rendered these materials to point where I am finally happy.  Now, I want to bring these materials into a different project that has already been started.  How do I accomplish this?!

For a while, I was making sure the material and asset names were unique and I would copy/paste elements with those materials applied into the new project... Yeah, I did...  Not anymore!  Wait until you see how easy it is to share materials between Revit projects.

First, you need to understand that a materials and and asset are two DIFFERENT things.

Another Cloud Rendering Issue

I posted about an ongoing cloud rendering issue back in February.  Well, here is another one that has bothered me and negatively affected some of my renderings...

If you use a material with self-illumination (such as "Light Bulb - On") and you rendering it in the cloud you may get an unwanted result.  I tested this a with a couple different settings and haven't been able to find a reason for it.  Here are the results...

7 Things I Learned at #RTCNA 2014

1. Chicago has some serious thunderstorms.

Many of you may have seen the numerous tweets about cancelled flights, delays, and overall travel annoyances.  I, too, had to deal with some issue getting to the conference on Wednesday night.  Fortunately, thanks to perfect timing and the power of Twitter I hopped on a plane with a fellow RTCNA attendee and made it on time.  To quote Jay Zallan, "these are first world problems.."

2. Schaumburg is NOT Chicago

Similar to RTCNA 2012, RTCNA 2014 was marketed as being in the big city of Chicago but ended up being about 31 miles away.  Ultimately, the conference was a hit regardless of where it was located (the only time I would have had to get outside would have been late at night anyways).  I have always wanted to go to downtown Chicago... Maybe one day I will.

3. Revit is STILL gaining traction...

I have been blogging for over five years about Revit, BIM, and technology as it relates to architecture and construction.  Talking about Revit everyday, working with Revit everyday, and blogging about Revit everyday may have caused me to lose a bit of perspective.  I've assumed that Revit (and BIM in general) had become the new norm and had been accepted as the new norm.

I was wrong.  When I saw all of the new faces at this years RTCNA (apparently there was a very large percentage of first time attendees) they reminded me that BIM is still on the rise!  This was an encouraging thought that will motivate me moving forward with the blog and BIM After Dark.