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angelo
2012-11-16, 06:02 PM
I'd like to keep our cleaned up and good looking materials in an external library for sharing across the entire firm. Updating materials in a master template is not ideal, as dragging a material over from continuously evolving material library would be more efficient.

I've created and saved this .adsklib file in a shared folder and can access it from multiple users. However, there seems to be lot of errors and paths for assets don't stick.

When two people have this library "open" or just linked to the materials dialog box, there seems to be no way to add materials to it (errors about the file is being accessed by someone else and that it's locked). It doesn't seem logical that for anyone to add to it, everyone else needs to be out of the file (and it still errors out even if someone doesn't have the materials dialog box open). Any workaround? I thought about two libraries - one for transferring and the master, but that breeds confusion.

If I move all textures folders to this central folder and path all images to it, when someone else loads the material or asset, it reverts back to local paths. I've added the networked path to to Options>Additional Render Appearance Paths, but it appears that Revit may even copy images over to the local folder install location! Not really helpful for keeping everything on the network...

Anyone dealing with these challenges? Is this feature just not there yet?

Thanks,
Angelo

greg.mcdowell
2012-11-16, 06:21 PM
From what I've heard Revit works best in this regard when the assets are placed locally and not on a shared drive. Less than ideal obviously. Maybe you could have the assets copied to local machines with a BAT file or something.

angelo
2012-11-20, 05:13 PM
Thanks Greg.

With more testing, it does seem that assets (including the textures) are copied locally once you import a material from an external library. Here are two blog posts that get at some of the capabilities and limitations of the current implementation:

http://aectechtalk.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/sharing-autodesk-materials-throughout-an-organization/

and

http://whatrevitwants.blogspot.com/2012/04/materials-in-revit-2013-saga-continues.html

Unfortunately, these articles still don't address the issues I'm trying to resolve.

hworrell
2014-07-23, 07:09 PM
Any luck with this?