Revit plugin DEMO viewport omitting material texture Tweet

[SamuelAB]

I don't know how they did it.
It does work because all the materials come in. Perhaps another reaching out to Autodesk would be required.

I also posted your idea to the "Revit Ideas"
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-id ... -p/7213772

[face_off]

Thanks Samuel. Whilst there are some hacky solutions to this (and I would say the solution in the plugin to hardcode the material names to the files in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\Materials is equally hacky), the onus is really on Autodesk to provide a solution, not plugin devs to provide poor solutions to work around the problem. Keep in mind that the Revit API also does NOT provide the texture WIDTH and HEIGHT - so I have hardcoded all those into the plugin too (a huge task).

Paul

[SamuelAB]

Hi Paul,

The company I used to work for implemented a successful solution to import Revit materials automatically within a week, plus a few more tweaks. I find it hard to believe that a startup can figure it out very quickly and provide a good solution, but that Octane, one of the best rendering and most innovative companies in the world, is having a hard time implementing this over multiple years.

The Revit plugin functionality says that is includes "Automatic conversion of Revit material and geometry into Octane" as the first listed function.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=34039

As I mentioned earlier, it's also possible to use UMC (Universal Material OCnverter) to got to Octane materials from Revit. But this step has to be done in 3ds Max. Still, UMC has been able to properly convert Revit materials into standard materials.
https://www.3dstudio.nl/webshop/product ... -converter

I've been reading the conversion instructions for the materials, but it's not 100% clear. I'm going to give it a shot and see what happens.
https://docs.otoy.com/Revit_Plugin_Manu ... Manual.pdf

Thanks!

[face_off]

The company I used to work for implemented a successful solution to import Revit materials automatically within a week, plus a few more tweaks.

Pls let me know how they did it and I will implement it in the plugin.

Paul

[SamuelAB]

They communicated with Autodesk and used the cube workaround.

[face_off]

They communicated with Autodesk and used the cube workaround.

Thanks. I am finding it hard to consider this a viable solution for the Octane plugin. It would mean that prior to opening the Octane Viewport, the plugin would need to use the Revit renderer to render out a cube with the custom material assigned to it. Putting aside to obvious issues of having the Revit scene lighting baked into the texture, the time it would take to process these textures would results in a potentially long delay when opening the Viewport, and the quality of the texture output would be poor - negating the benefit of using a high quality, physically accurate renderer such as Octane. It would be great to see users putting pressure on to Autodesk to resolve this issue - since I first highlighted the problem to them with Revit 2014, and 4 years later it is still an issue (and would be a trivial issue for them to fix).

Paul

[SamuelAB]

Would it be possible to recontact Autodesk? Perhaps they have changed their stance on it.

I mean for me, the advantage of using the Revit plugin over 3ds Max, is to save time. That includes automatically detecting IES files, lumen values and materials. If I can't do that, I'll have to use the Revit>3dsMax>Octane method.

But most importantly, I won't be able to convince my office that this is a sustainable workflow. Most users don't do 3ds Max, even less so Octane. I am not likely to gain support for either workflows if they are too complicated or obscure.

At this point, I can count multiple plugins that give us access to the materials of Revit: Enscape. InsiteVR, Lumion, Elumtools, IrisVR, Fuzor, etc.

There's SOMETHING these guys know that works. I don't know what it is, but I will 100% support you in terms of putting pressure on Autodesk.

[face_off]

Would it be possible to recontact Autodesk? Perhaps they have changed their stance on it.

I have a bunch of unanswered posts/questions in the Autodesk support forums, so addressing this and other issues that way seems to be of no value. I think these issues are better resolved by users putting feature requests in to Autodesk (containing the reasoning for the FR being the information you have provided in this post).

And the change needed to address this problem is only a couple of lines of code in the Revit API! It's not a complex or difficult change.

Paul

[SamuelAB]

It's not within my powers to push things forward unfortunately. That would have to be done by Octane's team or one of the devs.

As you can see, the Revit Ideas post got no traction (only 3 votes so far) because it does not resonate with regular users, it's a political intra-developer thing. I don't think the responsibility to lobby Autodesk for a more open API should fall on the shoulders of users, we don't have the legitimacy or access to the proper channels to do something like this.

[SamuelAB]

Here's an idea: Have you thought of exporting the camera scene as an FBX and getting the texture from there?