The material library, Revit libraries, procedural surfaces, and your own images — including resizing a texture that came from a model.
VUE keeps the materials the source file assigned rather than approximating them. A family with a real anthracite paint comes out anthracite, with its roughness and metalness carried across.
The images come across too. A material with a colour bitmap — a timber grain, a fabric weave, a tile with grout — arrives with that bitmap, at the size the family set in Revit. So does its relief map, the one that makes a surface read as textured rather than as a flat card lit from an angle. Revit calls that a bump map, and it can be either a greyscale height map or a tangent-space normal map; VUE reads which one the family supplied and treats it accordingly.
What it cannot do is invent materials that were never assigned. Geometry left as <By Category> in Revit arrives grey, and the fix is either to assign materials in the family and re-upload, or to override them here.
Relief maps were not read at all by converters before 0.6.0, so a family converted before that has the right colours and no depth: the material reads correct but flat, with no grain and no grout line.
There is nothing to fix in the panel — a model's bitmaps live inside the converted file and cannot be re-pointed. Re-upload the family and it converts on the current converter.
That re-upload is not a cached conversion and does come off your allowance, once per family. Why some conversions are free explains the rule.
The material library is a set of finishes belonging to your organisation, usable across every model. It is where the finishes you actually sell should live — one definition of your anthracite, applied everywhere, rather than a slightly different one per model.
A library material has:
The material library is a plan feature. If your plan does not include it, models still keep their converted materials — you just cannot build a shared library or use procedural finishes.
If you maintain your finishes as a Revit material library, upload the .adsklib and VUE imports the materials from it directly. That is usually the fastest way to populate the library, and it means the colours match what your Revit users see.
Open a material in your library and you will find Material names in Revit. Add the names your models actually use — Chrome, Steelcase - 6205 Black, whatever your families carry — and from then on, every model you import replaces a material of that name with this one. No opening the model, no picking it by hand, and it keeps working for families you have not built yet.
Capitals do not matter: typing chrome finds a Revit material called Chrome. Spaces around the name do not matter either. Everything else does — the name has to match in full, so chrome will not catch Polished Chrome. Add that as a second name if you want it.
A name belongs to one material. If you try to give two library materials the same name, VUE refuses the second one and tells you which material already has it. There is no sensible answer to "which of these two should win" at the moment a model is importing, so the question is settled here instead, while you are looking at it.
Your own edits always win. If you have already changed a material on a model — by hand, or by applying a different library material to it — a name match will not overwrite it. That is also what makes this safe on re-upload: the name is applied the first time the model is converted, and anything you adjust afterwards survives the next upload untouched.
Names apply to models you import from now on. To reach the ones you already have, use Apply to models I already have in the same panel. It tells you how many materials it would change and names a few of them before it does anything, because it is rewriting models that are already live on your website.
If a product comes in five finishes and eight sizes, you do not need forty types. Open a model, find Colours and finishes, and add a choice: give it a name, press Pick parts, then right-click the part on the model and choose Recolour with “…”. Add the colours from your material library and save.
A finish repaints the same materials on every type at once. Adding a ninth size adds one row, not five, and a visitor changing size keeps the colour they picked.
This is not a variation. A variation is a separate product — it appears in the type switcher and a visitor can be sent a link to it. A finish is a choice a visitor makes about the product they are already looking at, so it never appears as a product of its own. That is the whole reason it exists.
Pick the colours from your library, not as a plain colour. A library material carries its roughness, its metalness and any procedural or image surface — so “brushed brass” arrives as brushed brass rather than as a brass-coloured version of whatever was there. It also means retuning that material later can reach every model offering it.
Whichever colour is marked Opens on this is what the model shows first, and what the poster on your website advertises. Materials you have edited by hand on a specific model are left alone.
A material can be a light rather than something lit by one — the lens of a downlight, a diffuser, an illuminated sign. Turn on Emits light in the material panel and give it a colour and a strength.
It is worth reading Lighting and light fittings before you do, because the strength scale is the part that is not obvious: 1 is exactly as bright as white paper and reads as pale paint, and only above 1 does a surface start to look like a source.
Some finishes are quicker to photograph than to describe. Open the material library and press From a photo: attach a picture, say which material in it you mean — "the brushed copper body of the shower", "the seat fabric on this chair" — and VUE proposes a material.
Name one material, not the product. A photograph of a tap has chrome, a rubber seal and a worktop in it, and the sentence is what decides which of them you get. It is worth being specific about the part as well as the finish: "the metal body", "the carpet, not the skirting".
Nothing is saved until you press Save. What comes back opens in the ordinary material editor, on a sphere, with every number editable — so a proposal you disagree with is a starting point rather than something to undo.
One of three things, depending on the surface, and the difference matters because only one of them keeps your picture.
| Answer | When | What is stored |
|---|---|---|
| A plain finish | Polished metal, plated and PVD finishes, paint, plastic, glass | A colour, a metalness and a roughness. The photograph is reference only. |
| A procedural surface | Anything one of the families above already models — brick, concrete, a weave, timber, brushed or galvanised metal | The family and its parameters, adjustable afterwards like any other procedural material. |
| An image | A specific print no family can describe — a laminate, a terrazzo, a tartan, a patterned fabric | A patch cut out of your photograph, made to tile. |
The first two do not keep the picture, and that is deliberate: storing it would store the lighting of the room it was taken in. The third does, because for a particular printed cloth the photograph is the material.
It does not store the frame you uploaded. It is asked which rectangle of the picture is nothing but the material — the seat panel, not the chair — and that patch is cut out and joined so it repeats without a seam. The size it reports is the size of that patch, not of the photograph.
A flat-on shot of the material itself gives the best result. A photograph of the whole product still works — there is simply less of the material to cut from, and a patch taken across a curved cushion carries the curve with it.
Two things it will not do. It will not invent a repeat that is not in the picture: a photograph of draped cloth is not square-on to the camera, so the pattern cannot be measured from it and the patch is joined rather than cut to the pattern. And if no part of the frame is clean material — everything is at an angle, in shadow, or too small — it says so and gives you a plain finish instead of an image of your product.
Check the size before you save. Real-world scale is the judgement hardest to eyeball and the one that matters most: a fabric declared at 900 mm instead of 300 mm looks identical on the sphere and wrong on every model it is applied to. The Image covers figure in the editor is the one to sanity-check against something you could put a ruler on.
A flat colour is fine for paint and wrong for brick. VUE can generate the surface itself — no texture files, no seams, and correct at any zoom level because it is computed rather than sampled.
Eight families are available, each modelling what the material actually is:
| Family | For | Controls include |
|---|---|---|
| Masonry | Brick, block, tile, stone — anything laid in units | Unit length and height, joint width and recess, bond pattern, colour and hue variation |
| Monolithic | Concrete, render, poured surfaces | Mottling, blotch size, relief, shutter board height, tie spacing |
| Woven | Upholstery, curtains, mesh | Thread pitch and width, weave, yarn variation, fibre, sheen |
| Hide | Leather and grained finishes | Grain size, crease depth and width, pores, colour movement, sheen |
| Fibrous | Grass, carpet, brushed textile | Blade length and density, direction, colour variation |
| Brushed | Brushed and satin metals | Grain direction and depth, anisotropy, oxidation |
| Galvanised | Hot-dip galvanised steel | Spangle amount and crystal size, feathering, edge irregularity, dip mottling, weathering |
| Wood | Timber, joinery, flooring | Growth ring spacing and contrast, cathedral figure (the saw cut), fibre, open pores, ray fleck, and optional plank layout |
Start from a preset. A UK brick course is 75 mm and nobody should have to know that. Pick “Red stock brick” and adjust the colour and you have a usable material in two clicks; starting from twelve numbers at zero gets you a grey sphere.
Every dimension is in millimetres, and it means millimetres — a 1.5 mm thread is 1.5 mm on a chair and on a curtain wall, because the generator works in real units against the model’s own scale. Get the unit size right and the material is right at every distance.
Timber previews on a block rather than a sphere. Wood grain runs along a board, and wrapped round a sphere it stretches at the equator and pinches to a knot at the poles — every species ends up the same swirl. On a block the figure runs straight down a face at a readable size, so an oak looks like an oak next to a walnut.
Some finishes are not a family. A printed laminate, a terrazzo scan, a bonded fabric you have a photograph of: the generator cannot produce those, and something nearly right is worse on a product page than something obviously generic. So a material can instead use your own images, in the same panel, under Images.
Two slots, and they do different jobs:
Neither is required. A relief map on a plain colour is a real finish and works on its own.
If the material came from Revit with its own bitmaps, the slots show them, marked from the model. What you see is one tile of the image itself, not how it looks on your model — it repeats at whatever size the family says. The relief slot is worth a look after an upload: a greyscale square is a height map, a lavender-blue one is a normal map, and both are correct.
Those images travel inside the converted file rather than in your library, so there is nothing to point them at, no Clear beneath them, and no size to change. The family chose that tiling in Revit and it stays as the family sent it.
Uploading an image of your own replaces both slots, not one. Put your own colour bitmap on a material and the model's relief map stops being used as well — your images and the family's are not mixed, because a photograph of a height map that is not on the model would be a straightforwardly false picture. Nothing is lost: clear your image and the family's own maps come back.
You take a copy rather than editing the original, and the copy is an ordinary library material — which means it is also reusable on every other model you have.
On step 5 the panel warns that applying a library material replaces the images already on that material. For this round trip that is exactly what you want — the copy carries the family's own maps. For any other library material it is the warning it appears to be: the model's bitmaps go, and come back only by reverting the material to converted.
The family keeps exactly what it shipped with, so you can always get back to the original by reverting the material to converted. And because the copy is a normal library material, the same walnut at 900 mm can go on every model you publish rather than being trapped in the one family it came out of.
Upload your own photographs instead when you want to replace the finish rather than resize it — your picture of the real thing, at a size you can state.
Then tell it how much of the real world the image covers — 600 mm for a slab, 1.2 m for a wide-format panel. That is the same promise the procedural families make: model UVs are in metres, so the image comes out at that size on a door and on an elevation, with nothing to set per model. Rotation and shift place the pattern; relief depth sets how hard the surface is pushed.
Images are uploaded once and shared. Choose picks one you have already uploaded, so six finishes cut from one oak scan reference one file rather than six copies of it — and swapping the image on a material with Replace leaves the original in place for everything else still using it. PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 8 MB. SVG is not accepted, because an SVG is a document that can carry scripts and these are served onto your customers' own pages.
One or the other. A material has a generated surface or its own images, not both — they drive the same channels. Whichever is not in use collapses to a single button that switches to it.
Library cards say which they are: Procedural for generated, Texture for images. It is worth knowing before you click, because it decides whether a colour picker is offered and whether a visitor downloads anything.
Open a model, pick a material from the list, and either adjust it directly or replace it with one from your library. The override applies to that model and leaves the converted original intact, so you can always go back.
The small sphere beside each name is that material as it will actually render, colour bitmap and all. A plain white sphere used to be normal; now it means the material really is untextured white — which on a material you expected to be a timber or a weave is worth following up, and usually means the family assigned it as <By Category>.
An override set on the model applies to every type; one set on a single type applies only there. That is how you get the same product in a different finish without another conversion.
A variant is a saved version of a type with different materials — the same radiator in your six standard finishes, from one conversion.
Variants appear in the viewer alongside the types. They cost no conversion time, because no conversion happens — the geometry is the one already converted, with a different surface on it.
If the finish is a real product option with a parameter behind it, prefer a proper option control instead — see types and the configurator. Variants are for the cases where there is no parameter to hang it on.