Never Lose a Revit Family Material Again: 2 Easy Tips (Office Hour Sessions)

In this Office Hour Session I spend some time riffing on Revit material parameters and management between a Revit family and project.  I also dive a little bit into materials within nested families, family material parameters, and more. 

Click here to view the office hour session now... 

P.S.

If you think you would benefit from joining an office hour like this one... Join the BIM After Dark Community today...

Modern Kitchen Renovation Series - More Materials + Lighting in Revit (Episode 13)

 

In episode 13 of our modern kitchen renovation series we will be working on adding more materials and also lighting in Revit as we continue preparing for our client meeting.

I'll run through a really sexy floor material, some tips of copying materials, keyboard shortcuts, and adding some initial lighting.

Click here to view Episode 13 of the Modern Kitchen Renovation Series!!

Modern Kitchen Renovation Series - Adding Materials in Revit (Episode 12)

 

In episode 12 of our modern kitchen renovation series we will be talking about adding materials in Revit for the purpose of rendering in Enscape and making good looking orthogonal views.

I'll run through three different methods to making rendering materials from out of the box to custom materials. 

Click here to view episode 12 now... 

Materials and Patterns that Follow a Curve in Revit Tutorial

 

This is a quick video I created inspired by a Twitter question.  I'll show you a simple little hack to make your materials and patterns follow a curve in Revit!  The best part is they render correctly, too!

Click here to view the tutorial now... 

Create Your Own Seamless Textures for Rendering and Visualizations

I have stated many times on this website that using good custom texture images for your Revit materials will greatly enhance your renderings, elevations, and overall presentations.  It is one of the main points in multiple chapters of BIM After Dark Volume 1.  So what do you do if you find and awesome image of the material you are looking for but it is not seamless??

If you are not sure what I mean by "seamless" here are two examples...

This is a textures that is NOT seamless... Notice how you can see where the image repeats itself...

This is a seamless texture... Notice how you cannot tell where the image repeats itself...

The hardest part about finding good textures is finding ones that are seamless.  There are two ways to approach such a problem.  One is to find a texture online that is not seamless and make it seamless.  The other is to take a photo of the texture you want and make it seamless...  With either approach the following tutorial will teach you how to make a seamless texture from any image file...

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...

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.

Revit Tip - Create and Share Materials

Luke linked to a great post over at AEC Tech Talk about Revit 2013 and the ability to share material libraries internally...

Autodesk 2013 products allow you to create a library that contains the most commonly used and standard materials within an organization. 

 It can be daunting and confusing to users when they go to specify a material for something and there are many materials from which to choose. Autodesk provides many materials Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB), companies will develop materials in-house, and materials may be downloaded, all of which creates a large collection of materials. This article will describe how you can create a central library on the company server in 3 easy steps, from which users can select the preferred material.


..... Click here to see the post....