My render has disappeared

Thought I’d share this problem I had this week.

It first came to light when trying to add a material to a family and then render this family in a project. I discovered that if you created a family, applied a material from the standard Revit material library, maybe altered the material, loaded the family into the project and the material is ignored. In some cases the object renders black other times it does not render at all and the geometry disappears. The give away is that the render appearance shader does not take on the properties of the defined material. In the video, you will notice it will go black.

I tried installing the Revit 2011 hot fix which updated the “light.swatch.color.temperature.fbx” file, but this didn’t resolve the problem, however I still think it may be linked to this. I also tried all the tips here of uninstalling and reinstalling the library but this made no difference……

http://revitclinic.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/the-rendering-or-render-appearance-library-previews-are-missing-or-appear-black.html

I even went really extreme and completely uninstalled RAC 2011 with the VBS script which is on the Autodesk support pages, cleaning the registry, then reinstalling  RAC 2011, testing without sp2 , then adding sp2, uninstalling and reinstalling the protein material library yet again! But no difference. Then I had a sudden brain wave ( I don’t often get many! ) I  created a new local profile on my laptop and to see if it was affecting all users. To my surprise the materials rendered fine under the new profile and Revit was happy again.

So moral of this story is, if you discover this issue the chances are that your user profile may be corrupt. Deleting your user profile and recreating a new one, seems on the face of it to cure the problem. What causes this, I really do not know! Certainly try some of the Autodesk tips as I believe it may be linked to some of these, but I can at least now render in Revit without things disappearing. :-)