I recently had a customer who was rendering a townhouse scheme in Revit. He had some linked models placed onto the site he was busy rendering. Onto each building he attached a different brick material colour, although, in the resulting Revit rendering, it did not render differently.

I am familiar with this issue, as it is a common Revit materials misconception. One would suspect that, when you duplicate a Revit Material in the Materials Browser and you rename it, all the properties should be duplicated too. This is not the case as the corresponding “appearance” rendering asset does not get duplicated.

Once the material is duplicated in the Material Browser and you renamed it, you need to go to the Appearance tab of the new material and duplicate the appearance asset as well. Good practice is to also rename the new appearance asset in the information section of the appearance tab. After this has been done, the asset can be edited – like adding a tint to alter the colour of the brickwork on that specific material, as in this case.

It is important to also duplicate the Render Appearance Asset when duplicating a Revit Material to ensure you get the required results in the Revit rendering.