Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Extracting Revit's Material Textures

When sharing a Revit model with another firm, contractor or client, it is difficult to know which custom textures (jpg, png) files are used so they can be shared as well. This post will share a tip I received this week from Harlan Brumm at Autodesk!

First, there are two other options that might come to mind if you wanted to do this....


Keep reading to learn more...
You would think the FBX export (image above) would gather up the materials, but it does not. Unfortunately, for many reasons. On a related note: Simlab has some nice plug-ins for Revit that can do this.

One way to get a list of custom textures is to disconnect from the network and start a rendering within Revit. As shown in the image below, all missing textures are listed. This list will exclude any textures provided with Revit, as those will still be found on your local drive. The challenge is you still need to find which folder they are in, and manually select each one to copy out.


The "easy button" option is to install Twinmotion and use its export option, with Copy to folder elected for the Textures options as shown below. FYI: Twinmotion is currently free until November 2019.


The result is a folder full of textures! Only textures for materials in use are copied to this folder. So, if you have other materials defined with custom textures, those will not get extracted... which makes sense.


Do you have any other methods for extracting textures? Please share in the comments below.



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I also write blog posts for Enscape - a new paradigm in rendering, animation and VR for AEC.