Finding (Material) Neverland

Have you ever experienced your Material Browser taking forever to open the second you click that icon? 

One of the known issues I come across is if the project has a custom image map used for material Appearance but they are nowhere to be found, Revit is trying to find them through the path originated in its location. It will try to find them until it times out. In other words, the more missing material you have in the project, the longer for Revit to try to find them (i.e. the stalling). 

An Autodesk Knowledge Base post offers a similar explanation. 

This has become a serious headache for the user when:

• The Revit file was upgraded many versions ago and the material referenced location does not exist.
• The Revit file has material borrowed (or transferred) from other projects. 
• Custom material assigned to family content from other sources (e.g. manufacturer content)

How do you resolve an issue like this?

While I haven't found an easy solution, the only way is to identify which material via Material Browser has the missing image, and replace (or repath) with the image that Revit can access. Once that is done, the material browser can operate normally. 

This can be a daunting task if the project has hundreds if not thousands of material. Can I use Purge Unused to get rid of those materials? The short answer is yes but it is only possible to purge out material that is not assigned to any Revit system or component families. Even with purge unused, there could still be a lot of missing images referenced with the rest of the material. 

There have been some postings using Dynamo to help find these images. The process still has its shortcoming. 

I came across a tweet the other day when someone mentioned using a Revit add-in Ideate BIMLink tool. I started researching that solution. 

What's interesting is this tool and its feature has been around for years. While BIMLink is a licensed Revit tool, I haven't had the chance to use it until recently. What's more, the original intent of using a BIMLink feature is to swap material assignments for custom families to aid in a quick iteration of rendered design options for casework, furniture, and lighting.

Using BIMLink

Start Ideate BIMLink (I am using the 2022 version)

Click New

Then select \06 Project Standards > Project_Stds-Materials > Next

Under the Properties tab, you can add any additional properties to the right. You can also include materials from the linked Revit model by choosing Include linked elements.
Click Done to go back to the setting. 

Once you are back to the setting, click Export

This will generate the entire inventory of the materials list from a single (or multiple) Revit files whether the material is in use or not. 

Choose a destination location to save the excel spreadsheet. 

Open the exported file in Excel. 
The image path is under Appearance: Image

This is where you can see if there are any invalid paths that are no longer accessible by the Revit file. 

Another interesting fact, I was able to identify the material pathing if these custom materials from manufacturer content are ever loaded into the file. 

This example shows the content creator from the furniture company Steelcase placed the custom image map under the person's desktop?? Seriously!?

This is another reason why I have a trusting issue with third-party content downloaded from the internet even if they are from well-known companies. 

I wrote this post years ago that explains why it is important to have a vetting process in place if your office decides to use content generated by a third party. 

https://phil-osophyinbim.blogspot.com/2017/02/vetting-bim-content-for-your-office.html

In Closing

I hope this helps to resolve the issue with Material Browser which is slow to open. While the process is still tedious, it offers a more manageable way to track down a specific material with this issue. 

More on Love/Hate Relationship with Worksharing Monitor

We recently update our office suite product to new Office 365. While I am enjoying and learning all the new features from this latest version, I notice something was acting up with my Revit (version 2014) at the same time. Without trying too hard to find out why my worksharing monitor (WSM) isn't working again (also see previous post) this time, it is Lync from the office suite.

Lync, in a nutshell, is another web conference, web based collaboration tool. I haven't fully known the potential of using it yet but I will definitely plan on exploring it more down the road. It seems like it is very easy to use.

Back to the issue, the "fix" isn't hard. Just "exit" your Lync, re-run your WSM and you are back in business.

You can log in back to Lync afterwards. What bothers me now is it seems like there are more of these web based tools that are conflicting each other. Steve Stafford just wrote one today about a file opening issue in Revit with i-Tunes. My wish is having the WSM as part of Revit standard tool just like anything else would fix many of these issues.

Model Archive Using eTransmit Addin

Revit comes with some nice addin through the subscription center.

A good one recently would have to be eTransmit for Revit. This little gadget was first introduced in Revit 2012 as lab plugin and transitioned to a bonus addin from subscription site (In my opinion, this should be a standard tool already after 2 releases.)

The intent for eTransmit is to copy a Revit model (worksharing or standalone file) and other dependent files to a single folder for internet transmission. Using it like uploading a Revit file to different consultants (say Structural and MEP) for coordination will be very useful.

Lately, I have been asked by several new team members and they want to know what's the best way to archive some Revit files (For major milestone or design changes, we usually save a copy and date it). I immediately thought of using eTransmit is a better way to go. Compared to the traditional process of creating a detach model and save it as a new central file; if you have more than one model, you have to do it one after another. It is just tedious.

eTransmit setup is so easy and intuitive to use, you can choose to include other Revit linked models as well as .dwg linked files or even keynote (.txt) file as part of the transmit. The setup will also DETACH the Revit file during the process. In other words, this makes it perfect for archiving.

One suggestion though is I would go through a purge unused process before using eTransmit. Doing so would result a leaner file for archive purpose.

Love/Hate Relationship with Worksharing Monitor

"Worksharing Monitor" has been around for many versions in Revit. I love using it and always recommend people using it whenever they are on a large team working on worksharing file. It is helpful to see who's in the model and who is synchronizing with Central (SWC) to avoid chaos.

Up until now, this tool is still written as an addin. For one who needs to use it, you have to install this addin, then the tool can be found via the Addin tab. Revit 2014 made a nice improvement, worksharing monitor (WSM) finally gets its own icon in the Addin Tab.

I have a number of users who complain about WSM not being able to open in Revit 2014. I have seen this problem in the past; often times it requires Revit to restart in order to resolve this issue. This time, however, is different, no matter how many times they restart Revit, WSM is still off. After some investigation and tests with IT, we were able to identify the blame. The user was streaming "Spotify" in their workstations while trying to run WSM. After closing Spotify and re-run WSM, they are able to open WSM without any issue. **Note: You can continue to use Spotify after launching WSM.

I have heard other people from the RFO that WSM can be blocked with other software. As it turns out, many streaming sites change port configurations on the users' computers to optimize the use of them. I wish Autodesk can integrate this very useful tool into Revit in the future version. In the mean time, if you run into a similar problem, maybe you could try closing Spotify or other software and run WSM again.