From the course: SketchUp & Revit Workflow

Introduction to Revit materials - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp & Revit Workflow

Introduction to Revit materials

- [Instructor] So we're moving on to Chapter Five, and before we get settled in with applying materials to our desk, I thought it would be useful just to give you a little run-through on the material options that we have inside of Revit. They are slightly more complicated than the ones in SketchUp. So, whether you use the objects dials to get access to materials, and you'll see that in the project, all of these various objects. Some have materials applied to them, whereas others don't. Or, whether you go in via the materials, or a different method, this is what you might end up looking at. Now, it doesn't always look like this, sometimes it'll look like that, sometimes it might even look like this, so there are various buttons that you need to be aware of. This thing is going to open or close the material editor. Whereas this thing will reveal some of the other libraries that you can create. This then, is searchable, so we can hit the little down arrow, and maybe we're looking for something to do with glass, then this is going to give us all our glass options. This then, is contained within the Autodesk material library, as opposed to favorites, or AEC materials, or this one, the Chapter Five furniture library, which I've set up, which currently has nothing in. So, this box at the bottom contains all of the materials that we have access to. This section at the top-- I'll just sort of close that down-- this is all the project materials. And again, you hit the drop-down and you can select from the various types of materials I'll load into the project. There's not that many. We don't want to be blocking up an entire project with all of the potential materials. But, it does allow us to get started with materials. Down here, we have the option where you can create a new material, or duplicate a selected material. And these things we'll be looking at later, there are certain options that you need to be very much aware of. And these are usually to do with this thing here, the asset browser. This is probably one of the most confusing aspects of the materials, but hopefully we'll be able to go through it step-by-step. Assets are things that contain an image, so a render image, that's the appearance, a physical attribute, and thermal attributes. Okay, and when you create a new material, you choose from maybe something that's similar, so it gives you less work to do, but the important bit is that you then start addressing the various assets of that new material. And I'll just explain what I mean by that. I'll click close on this. And let's pick this brick, common brick, this is the one that the default wall looks like. So into the graphics, this is what the shaded color is. Notice there's no information here, which you'll see with the appearance, physical and thermal. These are all the asset bits, but in the graphics, this is how it looks in shade mode. If there's a surface pattern, this is what you will get. And this is a model surface pattern, as opposed to a drafting surface pattern. The main difference between model and drafting is that the model patterns, they don't change when the scale changes. If you zoom in and out, the pattern gets bigger or smaller, it's sort of a fixed size. Whereas a drafting pattern will get more detailed if you go into a smaller scale, say a one to 10, or one to five, then the pattern gets denser. So this has a direct correlation to the scale, whereas the model patterns don't have any scale, they just get bigger or smaller if you zoom in or out. So I'll just cancel out of that. So that's the masonry pattern, the cut pattern, so if you have a section cut through something, this is how it's going to look in cut. And again, we get to control the colors. Okay, so there's no assets here, this is just your graphics information. The appearance, however, is how it looks when its rendered, or in realistic mode, or maybe the rate trace. And the type there, we've the the masonry thing here, this is where the image is kept, so not that thing, but this down here, this is the link, so if I click on that, this will take me to the materials, and you can see there's quite a few materials loaded with the software. So these generic materials are pretty small in size, 138 kilobytes, usually round-about that sort of size. Now if I just go down here and textures, then I've got one, two, and three, and so I just hover over one, you'll see there's 161 megabytes in that folder, 234 in that one, and in this one we've got 680, so in folder three are better quality images, okay? If we want to change the size of this image, if we're loading an image in, then I click on the picture, and that's going to launch this thing, which is the texture editor, and this again has a few options that we can choose from, pretty much the sample size is the important bit, so you'd know a brick size, so you'd sort of work out the size, and then apply that to this. And that's the process you use for setting the material size, so count the objects, and then work out, sort of, an approximate size, or an exact size, and then you can put those values in that. Physical assets, so it's a brick, and this thing here, again, I can't stress how important this thing is, this hand of sharing that we have here, the physical attributes of this brick. So, I'll just come in and expand mechanical. If we started messing around with this, then all six materials that were shared with this asset, would be updated. So, again, it's important. If we decided to make the density greater or lesser, then that would be shared across the other six materials. Thermal, this is only shared with three, because it's a medium weight brick. So, just be a little bit careful the way you deal with these things. This is where these two options come in. This is going to replace this asset, so if I wanted to replace this current common brick with a different asset, then I can click on that little icon, and then I can decide which asset I want to take from the asset library. The other thing that I could do if I wanted to update brick common, and not update the other assets, I can duplicate the asset if I click on this, then this now is no longer shared with anything else, so it means that I can now update any options I want to inside of that. Okay, so we will be lookin' at these more and more as we work through this chapter, but I just wanted to give you a very brief overview on materials, because there are quite a few little things that we will be needing to consider. So let's move right on, and start applying materials to our desk.

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