Revit plugin DEMO viewport omitting material texture

[otoyrepeat]

Windows 7 64
Revit 2014 64
GTX 980 361.75

Is there a reason why the textures in Revit are not being displayed on the octane plugin viewport? Not only the textures but the environmental settings are not showing either (lack of shadows). Having to use the material selector tool on every face is really tedious on large designs. Is this on purpose or am I missing something here?

[face_off]

Hi

The plugin should pick up the standard Revit material library textures, as per "Material Conversion" at https://docs.otoy.com/#45Materials%20Tab. If this is not working - could you pls post a screenshot of the render screen and the Revit material panel from a material where the texturemap did not convert from.

Unsure what you mean by the lack of shadows...perhaps if you could provide a screenshot pls? If you are using an Environment Texture, make should the IBL texture is 32 bit (HDR, not LDR), and set the Gamma to 1.

Paul

[otoyrepeat]

Hi

The plugin should pick up the standard Revit material library textures, as per "Material Conversion" at https://docs.otoy.com/#45Materials%20Tab. If this is not working - could you pls post a screenshot of the render screen and the Revit material panel from a material where the texturemap did not convert from.

Unsure what you mean by the lack of shadows...perhaps if you could provide a screenshot pls? If you are using an Environment Texture, make should the IBL texture is 32 bit (HDR, not LDR), and set the Gamma to 1.

Paul

I'm using materials from the Revit library - ashlar, polished copper and thick grass. Reconvert from Revit does not change anything. I've solved the shadow issue - I just needed to play with the sun path.

[face_off]

I'm using materials from the Revit library - ashlar, polished copper and thick grass

The screenshot shows the plugin is saying the material name is "D300-ACM", which is not either of those 3 materials, and that material is not in my Revit Materials Library. So I don't think you are using materials from the standard Revit material library as needed by the plugin.

Paul

[otoyrepeat]

I'm using materials from the Revit library - ashlar, polished copper and thick grass

The screenshot shows the plugin is saying the material name is "D300-ACM", which is not either of those 3 materials, and that material is not in my Revit Materials Library. So I don't think you are using materials from the standard Revit material library as needed by the plugin.

Paul

i think I understand this now. A common good-practice in Revit is to duplicate materials so that any changes are exclusive to the workflow and not the material library. Am i correct in saying that custom material names (but with original materials from the lirabry) will not convert successfully to Octane? Due to a naming dependency?

[face_off]

Am i correct in saying that custom material names (but with original materials from the lirabry) will not convert successfully to Octane? Due to a naming dependency?

Yes, that's correct. The Revit API does not provide any texturemap names for Revit Materials to Revit plugins, so the Octane plugin has all the texturemaps for the Revit standard library material textures pre-coded. So if you change the name of a Revit material, the texturemap reference is broken.

Paul

[SamuelAB]

We need custom textures to be supported ideally. I know it's possible to get textures if I export to 3ds Max, use the UMC converter plugin (https://www.3dstudio.nl/webshop/product ... -converter), then use the Octane plugin to convert the materials to Octane. However, I got the Revit plugin to skip this tedious step.

We save our material images in the folder where the Revit files resides. I'm not sure if you noticed, but the Revit materials out of the box are terrible. That's why it's preferable to use other material maps. Are there any plans to improve the material conversion capabilities of Octane's Revit plugin? I'd love to assist you in any way I can because otherwise the Revit plugin loses a lot of it's value and I have to go right back to the more tedious Revit>3dsMax>Octane workflow.

[face_off]

We need custom textures to be supported ideally. I know it's possible to get textures if I export to 3ds Max, use the UMC converter plugin ( https://www.3dstudio.nl/webshop/product ... -converter ), then use the Octane plugin to convert the materials to Octane. However, I got the Revit plugin to skip this tedious step.

We save our material images in the folder where the Revit files resides. I'm not sure if you noticed, but the Revit materials out of the box are terrible. That's why it's preferable to use other material maps. Are there any plans to improve the material conversion capabilities of Octane's Revit plugin? I'd love to assist you in any way I can because otherwise the Revit plugin loses a lot of it's value and I have to go right back to the more tedious Revit>3dsMax>Octane workflow.

Hi - Revit exports custom texturemaps to 3ds via a closed mechanism that is not available to other plugins, so regretfully this is not possible. I suggest you put a feature request in to Autodesk for this.

To get around this issue, the material Defaults system is available in the plugin - so if you have a Revit material "MyCustomMaterial", then once it converts to an Octane material, you can manually link in the custom texturemap and then "Save As Default". Then when you next use "MyCustomMaterial" in a scene, the plugin will load the Default version of the Octane material that you saved. Not a perfect solution, but the best available given the constraints imposed by Autodesk on accessing texturemaps from the Revit API.

Paul

[SamuelAB]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply. I used to work at a company that solved this problem for Revit plugins, I believe they used the cube screenshot method:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ap ... -p/5801466
http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blo ... nates.html

Of course, many other companies have solved this issue (Universal Material Converter, Enscape, IrisVR, Lumion, etc)

I will try your workaround technique, but with 150+ materials in a scene, this is really the kind of work we want to automate as much as possible. If I explain this workflow to my fellow coworkers, they will laugh and never try Octane. We simply don't have time for this kind of tedious manual work when other software has solved these basic issues. Also, we have buildings to build!

Thanks!

[face_off]

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ap ... -p/5801466
http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blo ... nates.html

Hi - I am the user that they are talking to in Jeremy's post! I cannot see how the solution proposed would give an accurate enough, or high quality enough results to be acceptable to users. As you can see, Autodesk have been aware of this shortcoming in the API for many years. The API needs to return the filepath of the texturemap.

Of course, many other companies have solved this issue (Universal Material Converter, Enscape, IrisVR, Lumion, etc)

Have they /really/ solved it? Are they using the Revit API, or exporting to FBX or another format which DOES include the filenames? I tried a number of solutions which not only loaded the geometry into Octane from the Revit API, but also exported the entire scene to disk in FBX format (which includes the material filenames), and then read the FBX scene back in to obtain those filenames, however the material identifiers obtained via the Revit API are /different/ to those contained in the .FBX file, so it also was not a viable solution. It also tripled the load time of the scene into Octane, so was never going to be popular with users.

Paul