Materials problem with hotlinks

[Anonymous]

G'day folks,

One of the lads in the office is having an issue with materials reassigning or dropping off completely when hotlinking separate buildings into a site plan model. He's set up individual materials for each separate building (14 buildings total). They seem to be coming across on some elements but not on others. It does seem to be happening predominantly with complex profile elements. When you go through the Profile manager to look at the profiles in the site plan file, the assigned materials will be missing.

We're using v10 on PC with the latest hotfix. Any advice you could offer would be much appreciated.

Cheers.

Shannon

[Anonymous]

Setting up materials for multi-building projects can be very tricky. There are several ways to go about it depending on the specific needs of the project. The simplest is to have a single master set copied into all buildings in the project, but it doesn't sound like this would work for you.

The trouble is that you have already started so it may be difficult (or at least tedious) to sort things out. The problem is that some elements (walls, roofs, floors, etc) call materials by name, but library parts store their references by ID numbers. I'm not sure about the profiles nor why they would be especially troublesome.

Do you have someone there who is experienced with Attribute Manager? I have some ideas about how to fix things up, but they are difficult to describe in detail.

[Anonymous]

Hi Matthew, thanks for the quick response. Yeah I've used Attibute manager a bit, what do you have in mind? I checked one of the materials that had dropped out and they do have different indices numbers between the two files. I'm assuming that may be part of the problem.