These include the “Shaded” and “Consistent Colors” display styles, as well as the “Hidden Line” style typically used in drawings, both in 2D (orthographic) or 3D views: These properties control how the material looks in non-rendered views. As seen in the image below, these properties can appear in material takeoff schedules: Thus, they can be useful for organizing, classifying or keeping control of the materials in our model. The important remark here is that these do not affect the graphics or visualization of the material, these are only information attributes.

Here we can set the name of the material, as well as other attributes and characteristics. For each of the materials, we can identify several tabs with properties. We can access and edit the properties of the materials in our model from the Material Browser (Manage tab > Settings > Materials). This post aims to bring some clarity to this issue, by reviewing the different parts of the Material Browser, the properties that make up a Revit material, and the different possible uses beyond defining the appearance of elements in renders or other visualizations Materials are often a neglected part of our Revit models, as it is sometimes hard to know how much work and attention we must put into our material library.

Enscape revit material library