Network Material Library?

[kappy]

I've tried to read some about this, but I haven't found anything that answered my question.

What I'm wondering is, is it possible to have a Material Library on our server where every computer is taking it's materials from, instead of taking them from the local harddrive? Maybe redirect the program in some way?

This would make work alot easier as you wouldn't have to look for old projects with materials and try to import them etc, and materials would easily be shared between different co-workers.

Anyone understand what I mean? And do you have any idea of if its possible?

[David Conant]

To be brief, no.

In the 2011 release, Revit can only access the Autodesk appearances library. This library is not modifiable and is accessed by most Autodesk applications. Since it is read-only, there is no danger that different machines will have different versions of these appearances. Keeping it local avoids many potential path conflict problems without losing any functionality.

Image files accessed by appearances can be located anywhere, but there are some downsides. Since images are not stored inside the rvt file to control file size, Revit must look out to find them when they are needed to render an image. If large images are used and located on a network drive you may experience a performance hit when rendering as the application pulls them in. You may also lose image based appearances when your machine is not connected to the network.