Understanding Appearance Assets in the Revit Material Editor

Appearance assets are the component of a Revit material that tells it what it looks like when it’s rendered. However what many users don’t realize is that the appearance asset is actually not a part of the material itself, it’s being reference by the material, and multiple materials can reference the same appearance asset. Where the trouble occurs is when a user modifies a material, editing the asset that it is referencing, only to find out they just inadvertently edited a bunch of other materials as well, because they were using the same reference.  This is easy to avoid if you know what to look for.

This usually happens because someone selected a material in the current project’s material library and duplicated it to create a new material. While editing the duplicate they went to the “Appearance” tab and made changes to the appearance settings (they didn’t assign a new appearance asset, but modified the one that was already there – color, reflectivity, transparency, anything at all about the asset).

To see how to avoid this issue, take a look at the Screencast video that I recently put together.