Embedded Vray Material in Family

[vox_boy]

Hey,

I have been thinking that it would be good to have Vray materials embedded into Revit families.

Let me provide an example. Lets say I have a simple dining room chair, on this chair I have a timber seat, chrome steel legs and rubber feet. I then allocate 3 Vray materials to the three different elements of the chair, adjust the rotation, scale, whatever is required to make the materials display correctly. I then save and close the family and send it to a colleague, who can then import the chair into his Revit Project. Because the Vray materials are embedded into the chair family, I don't have to worry about sending any additional material files or anything like that. He can put the family into his project, hit render and the materials appear perfectly. If he needs to edit the materials, he can open the Vray materials tab and edit the chair materials as required, just like you currently can.

I understand that you wouldn't want to do this for every family. What you could do, is have a button that attaches/embeds the materials into the family, or something like that?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks, Nick

[Ana Lyubenova]

Thanks for the feedback, vox_boy!

I think that you can achieve something similar by exporting the V-Ray settings to an .xml file and loading it into another project (on another machine).
In case your V-Ray materials are stored externally; and both your machines have access to that location, all you need to do is to load the .xml file and add the path to the materials under Path Settings.
In case both of you are using the same materials from the same library, simply load the .xml file.

Here is an example: you have the chair family; use 3 V-Ray materials from the Material library which installs along with V-Ray for Revit; export the Material Map Settings to an .xml; send it to your colleague who also uses the same Material library; he loads the settings and selects which ones of them to import into his project.

Best,
Ana

[vox_boy]

Hey Ana,

In my mind the big issue with that, is that you are relying on the person on the receiving end to have access to your material library. If not, things can get fairly complicated fairly quick. Would it be possible to do something similar to a "Pack and Go"? This is something that AutoDesk Inventor does. it essentially find all the files attached to an Inventor assembly and bundles them up in a neat little package for you. It would be great to encourage people online to share models and materials, to grow the community. If there was a streamline way of doing this, I think it could be a great asset. What you say would work, it just seems abit clunky

Thanks, Nick

[Ana Lyubenova]

To some extent, Nick, you are right. We will discuss this in our team and see if we can implement it in our future releases.
One more time thank you for your feedback!

[vox_boy]

Hey Ana,

My pleasure, I just want to see this product develop into the best it can be

Thanks, Nick