How are you managing your Autodesk materials?
An often overlooked feature in the Autodesk design suites is the ability to save materials in an external library file. Autodesk material library files have an ADSKLIB extension and can be stored anywhere on your machine or network server. They are easy to create directly in Autodesk authoring applications like Revit, AutoCAD and 3ds Max. Once you have an ADSKLIB file, you can share it with other members of your project team to ensure a consistent palette of materials throughout the project or even entire organization. Here we’ll outline the steps to create one in Revit. But the process would be similar in the other software packages in the Autodesk suites. More importantly, a library created in one application can be shared and used by other applications. So even a library created in Revit, can easily be shared with AutoCAD or Max uses and vice-versa!
To start, access the Material Browser in Revit (on the Manage tab). Near the top, just below the search field, ensure that you are seeing the library pane by clicking the small icon to display it.
Click the icon to show the materials pane
At the bottom of the dialog are three icons. The first two are drop-down icons to create and open libraries and create and duplicate materials. To create a new library, from the first one, click the drop-down and then choose: Create New Library.
Create a new Material Library
Browse to a location where you want to store the new library and give it a name. It will now appear on the list. You can begin placing materials in this library, or optionally you can right-click to create categories. If you plan to add many materials to the library, categories can help keep it organized.
Right-click to create categories
To add materials to it, just drag and drop from the Project Materials pane directly above. You can drag directly onto the library folder, or into any of the categories if you created them. Selecting the library will display all contained materials and selecting a category will show only the materials within that category.
Drag and drop to add materials to the library
While you are working on the library, it will display a small pencil icon next to it. This indicates that it is currently locked while you edit. To finish, you need to release the library. Do this by right-clicking on the library and then choose: Release Library.
Release the library to finish
Once you have released the library, it is available for anyone else to access in any Autodesk application that supports the ADSKLIB file format. If you want to see the process described here in detail and see how to load the and use the library in AutoCAD, check out this week’s tip in Revit Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting.
8 Responses to How are you managing your Autodesk materials?
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The one “gotcha” we discovered with material libraries (and we do use them) is that surface patterns and cut patterns do not come along for the ride. It does not follow the material even if the fill pattern is correctly defined in the model. For this reason, we have had better luck with “Materials Models.” We can then use Transfer Project Standards to bring both the render material and the pattern into a new model.
Hi Phyllis:
Yes, this troubles me too. But it seems that the matlib files only support those features which are universal to all Autodesk products. So the Revit only stuff is not included sadly.
Nice post, Paul. And good reply, Phyllis.
This is one of those things I had been aware of, but had forgotten due to lack of use. It was good to read about this again.
I used to maintain a Material Model too in the past but I found it was an additional thing to maintain as well as my Material Library file.
Applying a new material to an item such as a table in the source project, and then copying and pasting to the target project works well.
However updating an existing material can be a challenge. Copying an item to a new empty project file and then using Transfer Project Standards does seem to work for me most of the time. Usually I get the Duplicate Types dialog box where I select Overwrite and the material updates. This is good. But in my current file this dialog does not appear and the material is not updated. Do you know why this might be the case please?
Thanking you in advance.
Anthony.
Hi Paul. This blog is very useful for me to manage the libraries across project and families.
I only have trouble regarding the naming convention regarding the materials.
Do you have any tips what is the best practice to name the materials?
Hello:
I don’t really have a specific naming convention that I adhere to. I just recommend that your names are descriptive and clearly indicate what the item is and that you name similar materials consistently.
I want to thank you for the informative Revit videos. We have recently configuard a Revit template for our architectural studio. This template has some custom settings for area plan and area schedules. But as soon as we added these custom setting, it is taking enormas time to load materials in this template. We are using Revit 2019
Do you have any suggestions for what could be the problem ?
I don’t think anything you did with Areas would affect materials. I have seen materials run slowly from time to time. I believe there may be a known issue about this. I would suggest contacting Autodesk support. They should be able to help you troubleshoot.
I’m not sure if the schedules are an issue however I’m also having the same issue. Couple of things I’ve discovered.
1. REVIT is looking for something regarding a material but appears to have a hard time finding.
2. IF the computer is disconnected from the network the materials editor comes up immediately. (REVIT knows if there is a network connection)
3. Not all machines on the network are effected – Some machines open the same file on the same network without issues.
4. I believe there is some sort of disconnect between windows and REVIT and a search protocol. Autodesk has not been able to tell me what the relationship is between the Material Editor / Network Connection.
5. Starting a project from scratch with only the default materials eliminates the problem except that most of our materials are custom in nature for rendering purposes.
6. This is a machine specific problem as some of the machines on the network have no issues but we cannot find what settings that have been triggered to cause the issue.
If anybody has any ideas it would be most helpful.
Mike