Aligning Revit Textures with Model Hatch pattern fill styles

By Dennis Collin 

Revit materials are a collection of assets which can be assigned to Revit components and families. A selection of these items are included with the OOTB (Out of the box) supplied project templates.

However a discrepancy can be noted on certain materials, for example, the acoustic ceiling tile where the model hatch pattern doesn't tally with the texture in the rendered sample.

Fig 1.         Hidden line view with tile patterns aligned to light positions.

Fig 2. Misaligned textures, offset from light fittings. (the light positions are unchanged)

The line drawing is correct, however there is a noticeable offset caused by the imperial to metric conversion i.e. a 2 foot US tile differs from a 600mm tile by a tiny amount that accumulates over long distances. This issue is easily corrected by editing the acoustic ceiling tile material and perform two tasks.

Firstly the texture sample in the rendering appearance asset tab needs to reflect the actual size of a tile in this case, 600 mm square.

In the preview image shown we can see 8 tiles in the sample image, setting that to 4800 will then get the texture sample to reflect the actual size of the tile in the model.

The second step is to check and adjust the texture alignment to ensure that the image offset tallies with the hatch spacing in the model. Use the blue ‘nudge’ buttons to align the texture to the model hatch lines. Save the changes to the named material once completed.

Fig 3. A correctly adjusted texture!

Rendering with the updated edited material now shows the improved and correct result!