We are continuing our monthly Ideate Software Blog series entitled Wishlist Granted. Each blog article features real user requests from Autodesk forums and discussions, plus many Ideate Software customer requests.
First, it’s important to have the most efficient Revit model possible. Elements that aren’t used can negatively impact Revit model performance. That’s a huge reason Autodesk developed the Purge Unused command within Revit. A page directly from the Autodesk Revit Help file states:
“Remove unused views, families, and other objects from the project to improve performance and reduce file size.”
However, Purge Unused doesn’t remove many styles that may be used within the Revit model. A Revit Ideas Forum request by Matthew Taylor at WSP is a perfect example of the problem, and the perfect summary for the following features requested by Matthew:
- Purge unused Fill Patterns
- Purge unused Line Patterns
- Purge unused Line Styles (and by association, this includes CAD import layers)
- Purge unused Subcategories
Manually purging these elements out of families is labor intensive
For this reason and many others, we developed Ideate StyleManager.
Use Ideate StyleManager to:
- Safely delete styles that otherwise cannot be deleted or purged in Revit software
- Merge non-standard styles into standard styles
- Forensically analyze the usage of all styles to understand the true scope of a modification
- Clean up Object Styles, Line Styles, Line Patterns, Fill Patterns, Filled Regions, Materials, Material Appearance Assets, View Filters, View Templates, Viewports, Scope Boxes, Text, Fonts, Dimensions, and Arrowheads
- Understand which views are using which View Filters
Main Ideate StyleManager dialog showing the merge and purge of non-standard and duplicate styles into standard styles. We are merging all the Families, Materials and Elements that have “Dense Sand” to instead have “Sand - Dense” while at the same time deleting the “Dense Sand” definition from the Revit model.
There are at least a half dozen requests on the Revit Ideas Forum for managing all these different Revit Styles with an easier method.
We love ideas from Revit users – feel free to contact our team via [email protected] to share yours.
Wishlist Granted!
Please review our other Wishlist Granted posts.
About the Author
Richard W. Taylor, Associate AIA – Technical Evangelist
Richard has more than 30 years of experience working for companies that develop architectural and engineering software solutions, such as Intergraph, Bentley, and Autodesk. He has over 20 years of Revit experience, and he was part of the original development of Revit while at Revit Technology Corporation. He worked for 12 years at Autodesk, where he presented, taught, and worked to improve features in Revit. Richard holds both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. As Technical Evangelist, Richard works with AECO clients worldwide, developing and consulting on BIM solutions. Find Richard on Twitter and LinkedIn.