Hey Grey,
I’ll try to clear most of your confusions. See below:
Does this apply to Revit/Enscape though?
No. This applies to older V-Ray for X integrations that were hard-coding paths to assets in the scenes. For some time, Cosmos exposes an API that is path-agnostic.
In Revit the only real interface I have access to is the “Asset Library” in the Enscape ribbon. Launching this then brings up a window titled “Enscape Asset Library”, but which in actual fact is the Chaos Cosmos library/UI (which is slightly confusing when trying to track down help articles and what not).
Cosmos Browser is one for all – Enscape, V-Ray, Corona, Vantage, Envision, doesn’t matter. All assets are downloaded to the same directory. However, in Enscape you will see only Enscape assets; in other integrations, you won’t see Enscape assets, because they are incompatible.
From within this UI I can select a single ‘Assets Download Folder’, and my understanding is that when Enscape is launched, it will browse this folder to try and locate any of the asset guids (or whatever else it’s doing under the hood).
Correct.
Where are the broken file paths that the documentation mentions residing, and is there really no way to resolve them other than leaving existing content in place in the existing location?
See my first reply above.
In regards to moving downloaded files we’re having issues with IT security policies blocking the functionality of the asset browser (i.e. failing to load) on certain machines. We have a selection of assets that we like using in projects, and the hope was that we could simply copy these downloaded assets to a new shared location, and have offline users point their download location at that folder. (Or copy those files onto a local folder if needed.) Thereby ‘moving’ downloaded files to a new location in order to give offline users access to those assets. (Although this doesn’t seem to be behaving as expected - some users sometimes see the assets, sometimes they don’t. A separate issue perhaps.)
If you want to change the downloaded assets location, the correct way for doing it is described on the page you mentioned.
My ultimate goal is to have a selection of our revit families linked to enscape/cosmos assets, as well as custom assets, via the guid. In order to guarantee that the assets are always loaded for all users, I’m hoping to store the downloads data in the same location as the Revit library (whether this be served based or cloud based). I’m beginning to wonder if such a setup (multiple users all sharing a downloads folder) is possible though? Or what the recommended workflow would be if part of the team need to work offline for periods of time, yet still have assets available?
The best setup would be to use a shared network drive. This way all users will be connected to the same assets.