Material Swap
PremiumBatch-swap material assignments across compound elements. · Explore the live interface below - every control works exactly as it does inside Revit®.
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Test it Live - exactly as if you are in Revit
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Get Started in Minutes
Four simple steps to bring Material Swap directly into your Revit® environment.
1
Create Account
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2
Download Installer
One installer, 52 professional Revit® tools. Under 15 MB.
3
Open Revit
Material Swap appears in your ribbon automatically - ready to use.
4
Activate License
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Why Material Swap exists
Replacing a material sounds like one operation and is actually three. The material sits in the compound structure of walls and floors. It is also painted onto individual faces where someone overrode it. And it is assigned through family parameters on the things that carry their own material. Miss one of the three and the old material is still in the model, still in the schedule, still in the take-off.
How Material Swap works
Set up one or more find-and-replace pairs - old material to new - with type-to-search on both sides.
Choose the scope: the whole model, or just what you have selected.
Choose which of the three surfaces to touch: compound layers, painted faces, family material parameters. All three are on by default because that is usually the point.
Scan a preview before anything changes. It breaks down per pair - layers, painted faces, parameters, the affected types and instances, and the categories they sit in - with a total row across every pair in the run.
Confirm, and every pair is swapped across every target you enabled, in one transaction and one undo entry. Anything Revit refuses - an element owned by another user, a compound structure the new material will not fit - is skipped, and the result counts tell you how many actually changed.
Before
A material swap is done in the layers and forgotten in the paint overrides, so the old material lingers in the take-off.
After
One operation covers layers, paint and parameters, and you see what it will affect before it runs.
When to reach for it
- A specification change that replaces one material throughout.
- Consolidating duplicate materials that arrived from different sources.
- Cleaning a model handed over from another team with inconsistent material assignments.
What it does not do
- It swaps material assignments. It does not merge or delete the old material - after a swap the material still exists in the project, just unused.
- It needs at least two materials to be present to do anything, and it refuses a read-only document.
- Swapping a material inside a compound structure changes the wall or floor type, which affects every instance of that type - including when you scope the run to a selection, because the layer lives on the type rather than the instance.
- It scans an architectural category set: walls, floors, ceilings and roofs for compound layers, plus doors, windows, columns, framing, furniture, casework, generic models and specialty equipment for paint and parameters. Stairs, railings, curtain panels, mullions, site and MEP categories are outside its reach, so the old material genuinely does survive on those.
- There is no progress indicator on Apply, and if the transaction does not commit - a read-only workset, for instance - no warning is shown, so check the result counts rather than assuming it worked.
Questions
- How do I replace a material everywhere in a Revit model?
- The difficulty is that a material can be assigned in three different places - compound layers, painted faces, and family parameters - and this covers all three in one operation, which is why the old material tends to survive a manual swap. It scans an architectural category set: walls, floors, ceilings and roofs for layers, plus doors, windows, columns, framing, furniture, casework, generic models and specialty equipment for paint and parameters. Stairs, railings, curtain panels and MEP are outside its reach.
- Can I preview what will change?
- Yes. Scanning the preview lists the affected elements before anything is applied.
- Does it delete the old material?
- No. It reassigns everything using it; the material itself stays in the project as an unused definition.