General Info

How to Make a Custom Material Texture for Revit from a Photo

By ArturUpdated 2 min read

Making of Custom Textures For Revit
How To Make Custom Texture In Revit - Easy And Fast

To make a custom material texture in Revit, crop a photo of the material into a seamless image, open Manage > Materials, duplicate a similar material, and in the Appearance tab replace its image with yours and set the real-world size. Then apply the material to your walls or other elements.

Clients often want a specific material on their building: a brick they saw on another job, a stone from a supplier’s website, a photo they took on their phone. If it’s not in the Revit library, you can make it yourself from a photo in a few minutes. Here’s how I do it, using a Chicago common brick as the example.

Make your own materials and textures for Revit

A rendering with the real material on it is a lot easier for a client to understand than a black-and-white drawing, so this is time well spent.

Video walkthrough

Steps

  1. Open Revit and start a new project from the architectural template.
  2. Draw a wall, create a new wall type, and give it a clear name.
  3. In the wall type, edit the Structure, find a similar material, duplicate it and rename it. On the Graphics tab, under Shading, you can change the color shown in shaded views. The brick texture I used is on my free textures page.
  4. Save a photo of the material to your drive. Open it in Photoshop and resize it to 512 x 512 pixels. Going bigger than that doesn’t give you better quality in Revit; it just makes your computer work harder. Save it.
  5. Make a bump map from the same photo: remove all the color so it’s grayscale. Black means a recess in the material, white means a raised area. Paint the recesses (like mortar joints) dark, and save it as a separate file.
  6. In the material dialog, replace the texture image and the bump (relief) image with your two files.
  7. Set the real-world size that one tile of the texture covers.
  8. Switch the view to rendered and check the result.

That’s all there is to it.

Download the files

Download the Revit project file
Chicago common brick 512 px bump map

The original Chicago brick photo, already made seamless, is on my free textures page.

Why isn’t my texture showing up?

Textures only show in Realistic view or a rendering, not in Shaded. Switch the visual style at the bottom of the view. If it’s still blank, check the image path in the material’s Appearance tab.

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