The material library, Revit libraries, and procedural surfaces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Six 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 |
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.
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.
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.