Using material parameters - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to show you how you can add materials to the geometry within your family. I've got a version of my simple side table family here open on screen and I've also got a sandbox file open next to it. So I've tiled them side by side. You can just do window tile to achieve that. Let me show you what this is going to look like when we load it into the project. This gray box right here, you can kind of see the edges of it are gray. If I select that, that's actually invisible. You can see the visible checkbox is turned off. So what this is going to look like is what we would see if we use this preview visibility mode. Turn that on, we'll get this yellow border around the screen and it will hide that box. So that's the way it's going to look in a project. But notice that the geometry is all in this medium gray color and that's because there aren't any materials assigned to it. So if you're satisfied with that, you can just leave it as is but a lot of times, you're going to want to have some material assignments assigned to the various pieces of geometry within the family. And if you look at the perspective view that I have on the right hand side, you can see several examples of that. Notice that the doors are two different colors indicating that there's two different kinds of wood for the panel and the frame and you've got the chairs in the foreground that are using one dark gray for the leather or fabric of the chair itself and then an even darker black color for the frame. And then here in the foreground, just peeking off in the lower left hand corner is some brown colors and purple colors indicating different materials on the reception desk and so on. We can achieve the same thing with our family. All we have to do is just assign materials to the geometry within that family. Now there's two ways we could do it. One is more preferred over the other but let me just show you both so you have both at your disposal. If you select a piece of geometry, so I'm going to select the top of the table here. Look at the properties palate. You will see some properties for the materials. So it will be here under materials and finishes. And you can see it says material and then right next to that, it says by category. Now this is why it's currently in this medium gray color because by category is almost like a non-material. Now, one option would be to click right where it says by category. Notice that a small browse button becomes available. You can click that and that will display the material browser window. Now, this window is resizable so if yours comes in smaller than mine, you can stretch and adjust that. And then there's different parts of this window that you can hide and show so I'm seeing the library down here and you can expand and contract that. So if yours doesn't look quite the same as mine, it's pretty easy to make adjustments. Now, we're in the family editor. So when I look through the list of choices here, there really aren't that many good materials to choose from. In fact, all of these materials that are in here are really just analytical materials that are meant for an analysis mode in Revit and those just come by default. So, the one that I'm going to use here, the only one that will be immediately noticeable is this one here called poche. Now poche is this bright blue color so we'll be able to tell right away whether we've assigned this properly because the geometry will turn this bright blue. So simply choose poche, click okay, deselect it and now that tabletop is this bright blue color. Now, assuming that that is the material that's assigned to this object permanently, in other words, if you look in the product catalog, we can't buy this table in any other material then that's all we we'd really need to do. But often, you will have more than one choice available to you so when you're paging through that product catalog, it might come in a wood material or a dark wood or a light wood or maybe even plastic laminate or some other material surface, right, different kinds of metal. So if that's that case, then what you want to do instead is create a material parameter. So I'm going to select the legs next and repeat the process but instead of going right to this browse button to browse for material, what I'm going to do is move just a little to the right and locate this button here that says associate family parameter. Now when you click that, this gives us the associate family parameter dialogue and you'll see that currently we don't have any material parameters but there's a new icon down here. I'll click that and now we get the familiar parameter properties dialogue that we've seen previously. Now the last time we were in here, we were labeling a linear dimension. So in doing that, the type of parameter was length but notice now that the type of parameter is material and that's because we got into this dialogue through the material parameter dialogue. So we're going to give this a name, something like table legs. You could assign it as a type or an instance but I think it makes sense to do it as type, in most cases because usually, you're going to purchase the item in a particular material, you're not going to finish it after the fact in the field. The only exception to that might be things like paint or wall covering where those would be applied in the field. So it is up to you. You could do an instance parameter for materials but I think type is a really good default in most cases. So I'm going to click okay here and then okay again and when I deselect and click away from it, it appears as though nothing has happened. The reason for that is quite simple. What we've actually done is we've applied a material parameter which is really like a material place holder and there's a little bit of a delayed gratification here. So to actually see whether or not that parameter is working, we need to flex it just like we would with a length parameter. So we're going to go to family types, it's the same dialogue that we flexed our linear parameters. Here they all are. But now notice that I have a material parameter called table legs and I can browse and choose some material. I'll go with poche again just for the heck of it and click okay and now the legs turn blue as well. Now, the difference is when I load this into a project, my end user can change the material of the legs but they can't change the material of the top. So that's the difference in the two methods. So if you want to permanently assign the material to the geometry and not make it editable, in other words, make it more like a constraint then do it the first way. If you want to leave it available to your user to be able to change it, use the second method. So what I'm going to do is go back to the table top and instead of just relying on poche being assigned directly, I'm going to click the associate family parameter again, create another parameter. Call this one table top, click okay, okay again. Now it's still assigned to poche as a default, that's fine but now that I've assigned a second material place holder, when I load it into the project, I'll be able to modify it. So now all I need to do is click load into project and because I have that sandbox file open over there in the background, I simply click it and you see it will switch windows. Notice it puts me in the place component tool and if I move my mouse around here in my perspective view, I'm already in placement mode. So I can click somewhere to place this table and I'll tap my space bar a couple times to rotate it around and place a second one right here and then I'll click my modify tool to cancel. Now because I set the defaults to that bright blue poche color, you can see that both of those tables came in in that bright blue poche. But now if I select it, I can make a change to those values right here in the project. Now over here on the properties palate, we don't see the materials because we set them as type parameters. So to get to them, we need to click edit type and then here you're going to see table legs and table top and they're both assigned to poche. Well, now all I need to do is click next to one of those parameters, use the small browse button yet again and that takes me to the material editor. Well, here's the difference. Now I'm in a project environment and look how many more materials I have to choose from. So typically, projects contain lots of materials where your family editor will contain just a few and that's by design, that's intended that way. So what we're going to do here is decide what material we want for our table legs and you can see I've got a metal chrome there but I actually have a better version of chrome. I'm going to search for it, okay. So you can see there's two versions of chrome. This little triangle in the corner tells you that for improved rendering, replace this with a newer version. That's what this one is. Okay, so this one doesn't have the little triangle in the corner so I'm going to select that one right there. I'll click okay and then let me do the same thing for the table top. Here's a porcelain ivory, porcelain lemon, let's see. There's plastic white. I'll just choose that, okay. So that's like a plastic laminate, let's say. So I'll choose that, I'll click okay and then let's okay one more time. And now because that was a type based modification, you can see that it applied to both instances of the table. So, usually you want to just get a place holder assigned to the geometry within the family editor and then wait till you get to the project to actually assign the true materials 'cause it's just a little bit easier and it saves you from having to load in a bunch of unnecessary materials in your family editor.