Back in Revit 2012 Autodesk changed the way materials work – so that they had separate graphics and appearance properties. This was the start of much confusion for many users – and still to this day it catches people out. You know the drill: duplicate a material; change its appearance properties and suddenly a hundred other materials change too . . . .
Well, I am not going to address that issue directly. Instead I want to look at a more subtle confusion that some users encounter: Exactly how do the different material properties display in each ‘Visual Style’ – it will not always be what you might expect or consider to be logical
Material Properties
In order to analyse this issue we start with two very simple material definition examples, applied to two elements in a Revit project:
Material 1 – Demo Generic
- Light grey shading
- Light Blue appearance (different colour to shading)
- no surface patterns
Material 2 – Demo Green
- Light green shading and appearance;
- no surface patterns
