Duplicate a Revit Material and its Asset

This is literally a page out of a book.,, my Interior Design using Autodesk Revit 2018 book.

Duplicating a Material and its assets:

It is important to know how to properly duplicate a Material in your model so you do not unintentionally affect another Material.

If you Duplicate a Material in your model, the Appearance Asset will be associated to the new Material AND the Material you copied it from! For example, in Figure 4-2.18, we will right-click on Carpet (1) and duplicate it. Before we duplicate it, notice the Appearance Asset named “RED” is not shared (arrow #3 Figure 4-2.18).

Figure 4-2.18 Duplicating a material

Once you have duplicated a Material, notice the two carpet materials, in this example, now indicate they both share the same Appearance Asset. Changing one will affect the other. Click the Duplicate this asset icon in the upper right (Figure 4-2.19).

Figure 4-2.19 Duplicating an asset

Finally, when the Appearance Asset has been duplicated (Figure 4-2.20), you can expand the information section and rename the asset. You can now make changes to this material without affecting other materials. This applies to all assets in a Material.

Figure 4-2.20 Renaming an asset

[end... a page out a book]

Duplicate Material and Assets Revit Idea

On Revit Ideas, I submitted an idea to allow us to duplicate a material and its asset. Here is what I wrote:

• While in the Material Editor, in addition to Duplicate it would be helpful to have another option; Duplicate Material AND Assets. Maybe an intermediate dialog appears to prompt (with check boxes) for which assets (Appearance, Physical, Thermal) to duplicate. Often, we duplicate a material and then have to immediately, manually, duplicate the appearance asset so the original material does not get messed up.

This could be similar to the options we have when right-clicking and duplicating a view (duplicate, w/ detailing, dependent). As an instructor and Revit support person in a multi-discipline firm, I find a lot of people do not know about the need to duplicate the asset, or they forget and accidentally mess up other materials.

To vote this one up, click here: Duplicate Material and Assets

Random Microsoft Word Tip

I wanted to get the three Revit material dialog images above out of my book for this post. Did you know you can simply rename a Word docx file to a zip and and then just double-click on it?

Every image used in the document is now listed here. They can be viewed, as in the example below, or select them all and copy to another folder!

That's all for today... thanks for reading.