Material pathing

[jbeaman]

Hi,

I have a question about the pathing for the main material/hatch/color settings. I've looked at the pathing in the options/rendering area and don't see what I am looking for. I am looking for where revit stores the information that you see on the right side of the materials main window so if possible I can place that on a network location to be shared be everyone. I already have company mat libraries on the network to be shared, but wouldn't that all be of no effect if users had different names in the default materials area?

Thanks

(see attached image)

[c-hawk]

All this info is project based. It's stored in the project file and is not available to be separated and pathed to like the rendering libraries. Your best bet to standardize is to maintain all the material settings (render, cut and surface patterns) in a std project file and have your staff use transfer project settings to pull the standards into their projects.

[jbeaman]

OK, so no matter where you open the file, that info will be there and as long as the material libraries are on the network and everyone is pathed there all should be well....right?

Thanks

[patricks]

The only thing is when you try to render, all the AccuRender materials are stored on your local machine, unless you go into the file path settings and change them. This is required if you plan on rendering a project using more than one machine.

Unfortunately, when I change the file paths to point to the AccuRender stuff on our server, it gets pretty slow when changing materials, especially trees and plants. Also the other day it wouldn't even render my scene until I set the AccuRender stuff BACK to my local machine. These are fast machines less than 6 months old (both server and workstation) over a gigabit network, so I don't know what the problem is there.

[c-hawk]

daaatttt's right ;-)

[c-hawk]

The only thing is when you try to render, all the AccuRender materials are stored on your local machine, unless you go into the file path settings and change them. This is required if you plan on rendering a project using more than one machine.

Unfortunately, when I change the file paths to point to the AccuRender stuff on our server, it gets pretty slow when changing materials, especially trees and plants. Also the other day it wouldn't even render my scene until I set the AccuRender stuff BACK to my local machine. These are fast machines less than 6 months old (both server and workstation) over a gigabit network, so I don't know what the problem is there.

Sounds like you have some serious 'chatter' or something going on with your LAN. From the sound of it, your network, workstations and server should be more than sufficient. One question, your server's running SCSI or server-class SATA drives, right?

[patricks]

we are running an SCSI RAID setup. I can't remember if there are 2 or 4 drives in the machine, though.

[c-hawk]

Just wanted to make sure you were using a drive that could handle multiple, simultaneous instruction requests. Does simple file server browsing ever seem to take longer than expected? It sounds like you might have a bad NIC in one of the stations that may be bogging down the LAN. Just a guess ...