Revit 2017.1 Import Rhino Materials

Following on from my post about the new Revit 2017.1 feature ‘Import 3D Shapes’, I have done some more testing on how to import Rhino files with materials (colours) into a Revit family.

If you import a Rhino file that has no colours or materials defined in it, you just get a dumb object in Revit that has no capability for controlling materials.

However, one of the subtleties of the new import shape feature is that it will recognise assigned colours in the Rhino file.  It will then create a new material in Revit for each colour.

To assign a material or colour in Rhino, you can either select an object and choose a colour/material;  or else you can create layers and assign a colour/material to the to the layer, then put the object on that layer and leave its object properties set to ‘By Layer’.
Once you import the Rhino file to Revit, it will take just the RGB value of the defined colour or material and use that to create a new material in Revit – any other material properties…