Happy to see Autodesk has added the ability to host shared appearance asset resources in BIM 360 to their public roadmap.
Not sure what 'Revit Ideas' is? Read this post I wrote about it: Revit Ideas
Of course, the specifics of how this will work will be interesting to know. I see one possibly challenge being most companies are not 'all in' on BIM 360, so will the main firm material library need to be maintained in two places; local and BIM 360?
Ideally (I think) we would have this in BIM 360:
- A firm-wide material library
- A project specific library
This would mimic what most firms are doing locally now. Revit can access firm standard materials from a read-only central location, and then staff can create custom assets in their project folder. However, I am totally open to Autodesk coming up with a new and better way to accomplish this!
On a similar note, hopefully Enscape would be able to tap into this for BIM 360 projects. For example, when using an Enscape provided material, it would download it into the project specific BIM 360 location.
TIP: At Lake|Flato, we downloaded all the Enscape-provided material assets and placed them in a shared location on the server. Our Enscape deployment points to this folder (see image below), for material downloads, which prevents it from being downloaded again and ensures everyone has access to these resources.
Link for this Revit Idea:
Share your thoughts on how this should work 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.
