"Default" Appearance setup

[DaveP]

Pretty much new to Navis - long-time Revit user.
I'm about to set up some standards for the office. I understand that you can create a set of Appearance definitions. Things like Ducts yellow, Beams red, Pipes green - whatever.
Since I'm lazy, I thought I'd ask if there exists any kind of a pre-built Appearance Definitions file (Revit to Navis)
Presumably, everyone has done this for their office.
Since all of the categories are hard-coded in Revit, I'm just wondering if anyone has offered theirs up to the general public or if there are any "standard" configurations available for download.

[dennis howell]

Nothing like what you describe that I am aware of. I have done what you describe and here are the steps involved. Decide where you want the "coloring" to come from. What I am leading up to is that in NW, the MEP items will only show up with the materials that is defined to them in Revit. So, most of the MEP items are set to a material that is basically what I call the old "pot metal grey". But this will show up in NW as just white. If you put a material on the objects, such as a "expoxy blue" then in NW they will shade blue. You would then need to do this for all the object types.
An alternative way is within NW. Build SearchSets based on property criteria such as the System Type, System Name, or some combination. For example, I build a search for PVC and Sanitary to grab just those pipes and fittings. Then with the SearchSet created you can assign either a material or just a color to that SearchSet. Nice thing here is to build your SearchSets and use the Appearance Profiler to setup the color matching. Then you can export out the SearchSets to be imported in other projects and export out the DAT file of the Appearance Profiler that too can be imported into other projects.

[RevitNinja]

Using the Appearance Profiler is definitely the way to go here. If you have objects appended in the file and have used the Profiler to apply color overrides, those overrides will stay intact the next time you open the file. The question here is if you can load your search sets and the DAT file into an empty file to use as a "template." Using a blank file as a template has been discussed here before, I'm just wondering if pre-setting the DAT and search sets that it is based on will save you some time?