Best Practices for Revit Materials with Enscape: Stone and Masonry

The fundamentals of creating a Revit material are fairly straightforward; create a new material, assign a texture and render in Enscape. However, there are a number of additional options which can have subtle to profound effects on your results.

This post will explore stone and masonry materials in Enscape and the best settings and options to make stone and masonry appearance more realistic when creating still images, 3D panoramas or exploring in virtual reality via Enscape’s real-time rendering engine.

For this blog post, I used the sample Revit model available on the Chaos website. Follow along using the sample Villa Revit model provided by Chaos.

Appearance assets: image, relief and tint

To pragmatically show just what each setting does, we will start with the most basic material settings and then make small changes, one at a time, to see what effect they have on the rendering in Enscape.

As already stated, creating a material and selecting an image file is pretty basic. In the image above, this is all that was done. It certainly conveys the design intent—a certain stone style, color, and size. There is nothing wrong with this early on, while material selection is still fluid. However, at some point the materials will benefit from a few simple adjustments to make things look more realistic.

Here are the current settings, in Revit's Material Browser dialog, for the stone material assigned to the wall. This material is called Masonry Stone Wall and has a JPG image selected.

The scale of the stone or brick must also be considered to ensure a realistic appearance. To verify the scale, click on the image preview as shown below.

In the Texture Editor dialog, the Width and Height can be entered. The required values vary based on how much of the stone/brick appears in the image. Clicking the chain-link icon allows the two values to be modified independently.

Next up is the Bump Pattern (i.e., relief), which creates the illusion of depth across the surface.

Back in Revit's Material Browser, we can select an image and specify the Amount, which is essentially "how much depth do you want?"

The bump/relief image can be either the original image file or, for better results, a customized version of it. More on this later.

The next two images highlight the material depth and lighting effects as conditions change — in this case, the bump amount. Keep in mind that the Revit wall is perfectly flush.

Appearance assets: brick

Another material that benefits from similar settings is masonry: Brick and CMU. Right away, we can see the shadow lines added for each brick relative to the directional lighting in the scene.

In addition to size, another important aspect of masonry is "coursing": the vertical placement of the material as determined by how it is built. Even if you don't need this for construction documentation, consider applying a Model-based surface pattern to the wall (on the Revit material’s Graphics tab). Doing so allows you to reposition the Appearance Asset (i.e., the brick image) on the surface. Simply Tab in to select the model pattern, and then move/rotate it as needed within any non-realistic Revit view.

When the Sun angle changes, the effect on the surface adjusts as well.

The next image shows the main brick texture on the left (a simple JPG file). To the right are two options for bump/relief images: one focuses solely on recessed mortar joints, while the far-right option also highlights imperfections on the brick surface.

The nice thing about these two options, compared to just using the original image for the bump/relief pattern, is that there is much more contrast in the image. The way a bump/relief works is that the darker areas are recessed, and the lighter areas are closer to unchanged — with white remaining unchanged. Thus, when using the original image, the ability to control depth is more limited.

Using Enscape's ability to animate daylighting, we can better understand how these settings affect a material.

If you do use the original image file for the bump/relief, you will want to use Invert Image in the Texture Editor (the same place where you can set the material's scale). In this image, the mortar joint is lighter than the brick, so the shade/shadow embellishments would not look quite right otherwise.

Stone joints

This next tip is from my friend and early Revit adopter, Scott Brown, from the BECK Group's Florida office. An easy way to achieve clean, consistent joints, as shown in the next image, is to use Revit's Cutout feature.

The Cutout feature is not available within the physically accurate Masonry material, so we must use a Generic one, as shown in the image above on the right. Use the Replace This Asset icon in the upper right if you need to change that setting. The image selected is an all-white image with a solid black vertical line on the far right; this can easily be created in Photoshop.

Using the Enscape Material Library

Everything covered so far uses Revit-native tools and workflows. Another option, and often a faster path to realistic results, is the Enscape Material Library.

The Material Library offers an extensive collection of ready-to-use, high-quality PBR (physically based rendering) materials, including a variety of brick, stone, and masonry options. Each material comes with its texture maps already configured, color, roughness, and height information, so a realistic result is only a few clicks away.

The library can be opened directly from the Enscape ribbon within Revit, or from within the Enscape Material Editor. Materials are organized by category in the left pane, and frequently used options can be marked as favorites. Select one or more materials, then click Import Selection; once imported, they appear in both the Revit and Enscape Material Editors and can be assigned to surfaces in the Revit model. Existing materials in the model can also be replaced with a library version.

One tip for teams: before importing any materials, click the gear icon in the lower-left corner of the dialog and set the Imported Texture Path to a shared network location. Doing this early in a project's life cycle ensures that everyone who opens the model can access the imported textures.

As already shown, a major part of what makes these library materials look so convincing, especially for stone and masonry, is the height data included with each. In the Enscape Material Editor, the Height section supports three map types, selectable from the Type drop-down: Bump, Normal, and Displacement.

Much like the Revit relief patterns discussed earlier, these maps tell Enscape which portions of a surface are raised and which are recessed. For stone and masonry, this is precisely what defines the mortar joints: the joints read as recessed and in shadow, while the face of each stone or brick unit catches the light.

Bump maps use a grayscale image (lighter areas protrude, darker areas recede); normal maps use RGB data to describe the surface direction in more detail, and Displacement maps go a step further, creating a convincing sense of real depth, ideal for deeply raked mortar joints and rough-cut stone, all without adding any geometry to the model.

One note: displacement maps are not compatible with transparent materials, so the transparency settings become unavailable when one is applied—rarely a concern for stone or brick. For more information on each map type, see the Material Types documentation.

AI Material Generator

Finally, it is worth briefly mentioning the AI Material Generator, available in newer versions of Enscape (4.14 and above) via Chaos Cosmos. Click the Material Generator button in the Enscape Material Editor, upload a photo of a real-world surface, say, a stone veneer sample or the brick on an adjacent existing building, and a tileable PBR material is generated in seconds, complete with color, normal, and roughness maps.

The result imports directly into the Enscape Material Editor and can be edited like any other Enscape material. This is a handy option for quickly matching existing conditions or filling out secondary surfaces in a scene.

Conclusion

Realistic stone and masonry in Enscape start with well-scaled Revit materials, then improve through thoughtful use of tint, relief, bump, normal, displacement, and cutout settings. Whether you fine-tune native Revit assets, import ready-made materials from the Enscape Material Library, or generate custom PBR textures, small material adjustments can make a significant difference in how masonry reads under changing light and viewing conditions.