Changing Colors of Revit Families

Hello, let me first start off by saying that I am relatively new to Revit so this might be a case of me just not knowing what to do. My goal is to change the color of multiple families in a Revit project to one color, say red. To do so, I was going to the library I had created from these family files and changing the color of the family there to red, which worked fine, and then reloading the family into the main Revit project. The first few times I did this, the effect was what I wanted, with the family color changing appropriately. However, after the first few times, the color change did not happen. Instead the families in the project would turn some random other color, like blue or dark grey instead of red. Or, even stranger, if there were multiple instances of a family in the project, some of the instances would change to red and others would not. Any suggestions for what may be happening? This is Revit 2014.

I’m not sure why this is happening, but did you try changing the color of the family in the project instead of in the family environment? It could be easier to control.

What are you changing to affect the color? If you use a different material not yet defined in the project (or change the name which is the same thing) then it will work. If you only change the color of a material in the family editor which is already in the project it will not work. Materials in projects overrule materials in families. So once you've added a material (by loading a family) once, you can't affect it from the family after that. But you can still change the properties of the material in the project though.

I suggest you stick to a good naming system for your materials, then you can keep tweaking their appearance in you projects and project templates. Twitching out and changing materials can cause a lot of bother over time.

Thanks so much for the replies. I am now creating a new material for each of the items and that is working very well. However, there were some models that I downloaded from a third party, for example revit city, and I am not able to create a new material for these pieces in the same way. Is there a way to do that similar to what I am doing for my custom models?