Assigning Custom Material Assets

Revit
1

I’m trying to easily control and maintain my office’s material library in Revit by creating and updating it from a central excel file.
The last step we still want to add/control is assigning material assets.
I’m not super familiar with assets but I’ve copied some of the standard ones and added them to a separate library ‘POLO_Assets’. But the node appears to only be able to assign assets from the standard Autodesk library. Any ideas?

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MaterialAsset.dyn (16.8 KB)

2

I believe the assets have to be added to the file, and cannot be pulled from the library. Last time I checked, this had to be done via a manual process, which hurts to even type, but this aspect of Revit has a lot of added complexity as this library is somewhat universal across Autodesk products (ie: 3DSMax, Maya, AutoCAD, etc.).

Material asset libraries are so complex I simply gave up working with them back when I was practicing, and instead used a single family with all of the assets inside of it. This had a few advantages in that it made movement between systems easier (more users are familiar with movement of materials this way as we do it all the time with say furniture families). I believe the system would work within the Autodesk Docs ecosystem as well.

Further, an automation routine can:

  • Open said family in the background
  • Get the list of materials with the desired assets based on whatever mapping method you want to utilize
  • Make a new family type for each material and asset combo you want to bring into the project, setting the type name accordingly
  • Apply the material with the given asset to a type parameter
  • Purge unused materials and assets
  • Load the family into the document and close the family without saving
  • Delete the family and types (but not the materials)

It was not ideal for a LOT of reasons (ie: an edit in the project wasn’t an edit in the library), but I managed to get the job done with it.