The Best Collection of Family Creation Utilities

Family Tools provides utilities to make it easier to work with Revit family files.

The Pain Point

There are many tedious tasks involved with managing family files, such as deleting old backup files and comparing and merging shared parameter files. It’s also annoying to not be able to determine the version of a family file before opening it, so you can select the correct version of Revit to use to open it the first time.

Key Features

Delete backup files

Whenever a family file is saved, Revit typically creates a backup file in the same folder. Sometimes several backup files can exist for a single family file. This feature lets you easily specify to delete all the backup files in an entire folder structure.

Merge shared parameters

Shared parameter files are specially-formatted text files that define the names and data types for special parameters that are used in Revit. This feature makes it easy to see the difference between two shared parameter files, and to be able to select parameters from one shared parameter file and merge them into another.

Prepare Projects For Consultants

Project Cleaner can be used to lighten models to be sent to outside parties, resulting in smaller file sizes. It also allows you to easily remove information from a Revit model before sending it to an outside party to help protect your intellectual property. It can also be used to remove items in projects provided by an outside party which may not be desirable for in house use, or to remove items that don’t conform to your organization’s standards.

Key Features

Workflow

Project cleaner has 3 tabs which are used to select the views, schedule, sheets and links for removal.

• Check the checkbox next to each element that should be removed.
• Once desired selections have been made on all 3 tabs click the “Remove” button in the toolbar at the top of the dialog. This will remove all items selected on all tabs.
• Before deleting the elements, a confirmation dialog will be displayed.

Options

The options dialog controls default behavior of the add-in and also contains sorting options for the lists of items in the interface.

Manage Your Revision Clouds

This tool removes non-issued revision clouds from your project. It will list the revision clouds in a project, including the quantity for each.

You can select which revision clouds to remove, or remove all of them.

Overview

Revision Cloud Remover deletes all non-issued revision cloud instances from each view in a Revit project.

While the tool does not merge all the revision cloud schedules, the revision cloud information will be removed from the sheets.

Remove selected revision clouds

Click on the ribbon button and select the revisions you want to delete from all views in the current project. Clicking ‘Remove’ will complete the process and all selected revisions will be removed.

Easily Identify Dimensions

Dimension Checker identifies dimension strings using the dimension override options and presents them for review. Additional filter options can be used to narrow the search results.

Search filters

The first step when using Dimension Checker is to select the search options. The three options for filtering search results are “Dimension Value”, “Text Field” and a list of special characters to search for. These options are related directly to the native Revit “Dimension Text” dialog that is used to configure dimension overrides in Revit.

For each dimension the following information is collected and displayed:

• Element ID – The Revit ID of the dimension
• Host View –  The view on which the dimension is located
• Segments – List how many dimension lines are of the same value
• Actual Value – The as-measured value of the dimension
• Replace with Text Value – Shows the text value used to replace dimension if configured
• Text Above – Shows text above if configured for the dimension string
• Text Below – Shows text below if configured for the dimension string
• Text Left – Shows prefix text if configured for the dimension string
• Text Right – Shows Suffix text if configured for the dimension string

Ability to Drive Shared Parameters Into Families

Family Processor is a tool that allows you to define one or multiple changes to one or more Revit family files, and then process those changes in batch.

The Pain Point

Making changes to family files is a time consuming manual process. The people with the skills to properly make changes to families are usually in high demand and can’t spare days or weeks of time to manually push changes into their family library.

Key Features

Add shared and family parameters, and for those new parameters:

• Define whether they are instance or type
• Set their group
• Set or clear their default value or formula
• Define a family parameter’s name and type

Change existing parameters

• Value – Formula
• Whether they are instance or type
• The Name, for family parameters
• Their group

Modify materials in selected families

• Delete one or more materials, with a special option to delete the default materials
• Create materials
• Change the name, transparency value and basic red, green, and blue values for materials

The ability to automate these tasks with accuracy and consistency can provide enormous time and cost savings, as well as reduce the likelihood of human error inducing mistakes in your families.

Here’s a link to the White Paper

Quickly Load or Reload Revit Links

Import and Link Manager assists with locating and managing imported or linked CAD objects or Revit models within a Revit project. It can be used to find imported or linked DWG files in your Revit project, and can change workset assignments of imports and links.

The main dialog

The main dialog lists all of the imported or linked CAD or Revit files in the active project. For each file, the following information displayed:

• Name – The value of the “name” parameter under identity data for the import or link
• Element ID – The Revit element ID of the import or link
• Insertion Method – Displays Import or Link
• Workset – Displays the import or link’s assigned Workset
• Host View – Displays either the view hosting the import/link or “(All Views)”
• Type – The file extension of the imported or linked file
• Pinned – Displays the Pinned status, a checked box indicates the element is pinned
• Linked File Location – For linked files only, this field displays the path to the linked file
• Status – For linked files only, if the linked file can be found at path a “Loaded” status will be displayed, if the file can’t be found an “Invalid” status will be displayed

Load/unload files

This part of the tool can be used to load or unload links in a Revit project. This tool can only be used on documents that are not open in any Revit session. When used, the list of links contained in the selected project file will be displayed.

Common Challenges

• Revit content families from many sources are difficult and time consuming to validate
• Inconsistent families and standards cause frequent issues in projects
• Process of evaluation is tedious and labor intensive for BIM managers
• Valuable criteria for evaluation of families sourced from many vendors, manufacturers, contractors and companies is available but difficult to apply

Solution – Family Checker

• Comes packaged with established criteria for evalution
• Use on-the-fly to validate a family or run on batches of family files
• Optionally choose additional evaluation criteria for manufacturer content
• View evaluation results in the provided spreadsheet or export to a spreadsheet file
• Check many factors such as parameter naming, geometric constraints, embedded CAD use, file sizes and more

ROI

• Run smoother Revit projects with consistent standards and data
• Save hours of management time by automating the process of validating Revit content
• Safely vet hundreds of families without modification
• Analyze multiple aspects of entire libraries of any current Revit version
• Provide higher quality design data and documentation for any project

Schedule Parameter Resolver makes it fast and easy to synchronize multiple schedules with the right parameter information by changing the parameter definitions in the schedule to match the parameters used in families within the project, without losing the schedule formatting.

Mass Create New Shared Parameters

Easily reorganize shared parameters via drag and drop, both within a single shared parameter file or between two files. Load shared parameters into projects based on reusable selection sets.

Adding parameters

You select the name, parameter group, discipline, parameter type and the category. Once added, the new parameters will be added to the shared parameters file.

Filters

Filters can be used to show conflicting, duplicate and unique parameters as well as identify naming issues in parameter names for both shared parameter files.

Selection sets

Save collections of Shared Parameters from one shared parameter file and all of the settings required to create project parameters from them.

Sorting

The organization of the shared parameter file can be changed to make locating parameters easier. To organize the shared parameter file by shared parameter groups.

Copying parameters

To copy shared parameters between files, select the desired parameters and drag and drop them from one shared parameters file to the other.

Swapping types, and even families, is no longer a time-consuming process when using Type Swapper. Discover the simplicity of identifying and deleting duplicates.

Key Features

• Swap duplicate families resulting from copying content from project to project
• Remove duplicate families after swapping types
• Quickly identify and swap line types, text styles & dimension styles.