The Superb Guide to Easy Revit

RINA SAHAY: Hello, everybody. My name is Rina, and I am happy to welcome you to our session of the Superb Guide To Easy Revit. So you know, welcome to our show.

So in our show we are going to-- it's actually a lot of shows. We start with Tip-O-Mania, go on to Fast and Furious Revit. Then there's Trick-A-Palooza, No More Doomsday Revit. Yeah, everybody wishes, right?

And finally, we're going to end with I am Revit legend, or rather, you are Revit legend. Let's start by introducing the superb team that is going to present this wonderful information to you.

Starting from the bottom, rather starting from the middle, my colleague Viveka, who is a design technologist and designated specialist for AEC/VR products at Autodesk, she has been called away on a family emergency. So she will be unable to join us.

Let me introduce you to my esteemed colleague, Nauman. You would know him better as Dr. Revit, or the BIMologist. He is the design technology manager at [INAUDIBLE] in LA. And his passion and his superpower, so as to speak, is model health, model corruption, and troubleshooting.

Nauman, over to you. Who am I?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah, I wanted to introduce you to Rina Sahay. And she is an Autodesk expert elite as well, and amazing personality. And also, don't forget to check out her blog, Rina's Random Revitisms on LinkedIn. And you can find her on the community, or sometimes on directly if you get support tickets.

RINA SAHAY: Wonderful. Well, thank you. So let's talk about what it is we're going to talk about today. And you've seen all these objectives already, right? You saw them when you signed up for the class. Let's talk about the objectives in friendlier terms.

This is going to be a collection of superb tips and timesaver alerts along with speaker favorites, with the objective to make you more productive, make you come up with better quality deliverables. Help you to really, really leverage your knowledge of Revit. Help you to resolve your model, and manage and create extremely presentable views, annotations, and families.

So Nauman, can we start talking about learning objective one?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah, sure. So we'll talk about some quickest, easiest workflows, and how we can expedite our repetitive tasks within Revit. So let's get going on that.

And talking about the first item is make sure to visit the setup under options for Revit. We'll talk about this Options dialog box along the whole session and touch on it a little bit more detail. But here, the first one is under the General. My favorite is to make sure that I turn this Save Reminders to 15 minutes.

Because I keep telling people like if you get this dialog box snag, and you hit Cancel, then don't come to me to recover your file because I don't have any other ways to recover that file. Also, we'll talk about some new discipline setups. You want to make sure that your default view discipline is set up correctly. So any time you create a new view, it's automatically set to that discipline.

And let's go further with the same dialog box. You have the graphics section where you can control and customize the background, selection colors. You can go to the black color, like in AutoCAD days if you want to, for that matter.

Or my favorite thing is, as I'm getting old-- you know how that goes, but temporary dimension text [INAUDIBLE] size. You can increase that, and it makes it so much easier to work with temporary dimensions within Revit.

So but Revit tweaks, I mean, as I said, I mean it's a wholesale system because you have to look at the windows as well as Revit. Another favorite of mine is to customize the color of my Revit screen, as well as my Windows cursor sizes, and the color of my cursor so it's easier to see.

And when I'm presenting especially, it's easier to see for other users my mouse locations. And with that, my first speed up tips are about keyboards. Out of the box, our favorites are Control-D to toggle to my home page, or Control-W to close files, BV visibility graphics. Or one of my other favorites is CS, which is to Create Similar. It's amazing, as well as RC for Repeat the last Command.

Just don't be intimidated by remembering all the shortcut commands up front. You can always review them if you hover over a tool. And it will show you in the bracket, WA in this case. It has a shortcut assigned. In case of a floor, it does not have a shortcut. It won't have the item in the bracket as such.

And also, we can also customize the keyboard shortcuts. If as floor doesn't have one, or some other command that you use often doesn't have a shortcut, you can go to the user interface into the view, click on Keyboard Shortcuts. And here you can look at by the tab. You can search the command and assign a shortcut to it.

You can also assign shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts to your custom add-ins as well. I mean, I use a lot of IDA tools. And Rina uses CTC software, as well as my all time fave points, 3D option section box tool. I assign shortcuts to those as well.

Now, in Revit you can assign multiple keyboard shortcuts to the same command. Out of the box, Revit does VP for properties, Control 1, VP again for View Properties. So you can assign, and also someone out of the box also assigns them.

My absolute favorite also is the Control-F shortcut in the Project Browser focus. If you just press Control-F or right click and search, you can type in partial name of a view or a family and quickly search in the project browser rather than trying to hunt through the whole thing.

Another item about shortcuts is that multiple commands can be assigned the same shortcut, but as I say, it becomes a little bit of a rigmarole trying to figure out how to run that command. It's better just to avoid it. It becomes a long shortcut if you do have that.

Another item about keyboard shortcut is that you can share it with others, as well as you can export it for backups for your needs, and import it on another computer. So it becomes a good tool right here with the import and export features within the keyboard shortcuts dialog box.

However, my daily workhorse is, you know, your left hand is on the keyboard, and your right hand is on the mouse. Sorry for the left. I didn't mean to offend anybody, or vise versa. But at least the Escape, Tab, Control, and Shift keys are always accessible. And they are always used a lot.

My favorite is the spacebar. And Rina will show you why that is the case a little later. And finally, in this case, Rina's favorite is SY, custom shortcut for Synchronize with Central, minus RL for Reload Latest.

I do that a lot because I want to make sure. And then I do the synchronized after the fact. And I have shared my KeyboardShortcuts.xml list so you can practice what we just talked about. You can import it. But make sure you back up what you have already before doing that. Now, over to Rina.

RINA SAHAY: Thank you, Nauman. Now, let's talk about the computer mouse. I mean, a mouse, we think it's a really cute, little animal. Well, not really cute.

But now we have this very cute, little piece of machinery, of equipment, fits in the palm of the hand. And when this input device is used in combination with a keyboard, the mouse can help you to access tasks without the need-- can help you to access tasks very, very easily. So let's take a look at ways to use this combination to accomplish tasks.

The first tip I have is to click and/or drag the view cube to zoom into selected objects. I think this is really cool. This is a really neat way to take a really close look at various angles of a particular selected element.

We can also zoom in and out of schedule views to. With effect from Revit 2020 we are now able to hold down the Control key, zoom in and out. It never was this way before. So now you can actually get a close look and make sure that your schedule is absolutely correct. My apologies to those of you who may be feeling dizzy or nauseous with the way that this video runs.

Now, in addition to move quickly by click and drag, or click Control and drag to copy quickly, incidentally, if you go Control, click, Shift, and drag, you can create an aligned copy. You can move nearby elements.

Now, in the animation that you see I have got a bunch of furniture. I have selected all of them. I have told them to move with nearby objects. And you know what? When I click on the Activate Dimensions button, dimensions show up. And now I can be very, very precise in the position of these elements.

When I grab the wall and I move it, it drags the furniture along with it. Totally cool. The joys of right click--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: By the way, Rina, so my favorite is the Activate Dimensions. Because you can move a lot of elements together with the temporary dimensions using the Activate Dimension tool.

RINA SAHAY: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's really, really helpful. All right, now, we've just seen what happens when you left click the mouse. When you right click the mouse you can't repeat previous commands. You can access snap overrides. And these snap overrides will override any snap settings that you already have set up.

My personal favorite out of these-- and that's because I've been working a lot with point clouds lately, use the snap to point clouds option. And that will allow you to snap to the point clouds, work more accurately.

Double clicking! You can double click to edit boundaries. You can double click to edit the families. And you would do that instead of clicking on the family instance or clicking on the element, and going to click boundary, or going to edit boundary, or edit family. It's just one less mouse click.

Now, what you may not know so far is that you can actually customize the default double click behavior. By default, it will edit family or edit boundary. If you go into the Options menu, you can select and change, modify, edit double click behaviors.

Speaker favorite, especially [INAUDIBLE]. You can right click on Tools. Click on Add to Quick Access Toolbar. You can drag the Quick Access Toolbar, and move it to a convenient location for you.

And with that, Nauman, over to you for selection tools.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You want to be at least selective about what you are selecting, and moving or deleting rather, I would say. Because people have a habit of deleting or moving late files, or trying to delete pinned elements. And might as well not just selecting them in the first place.

If you look at the Modify icon, underneath it, the arrow, if you expand it you can select various options. Say you want to allow it to select links, underlay elements, or even pinned elements. This is also accessible through icons at the bottom right of your screen on the status bar.

As well, my tip would be to drag elements on selection, to uncheck this, because it will inadvertently move elements without even you realizing it. So it's a good idea to kind of uncheck that.

What this does is just hovering over an object and clicking once. And moving your mouse will drag and move the item, versus clicking it, then clicking again, and holding the mouse and dragging it.

The other is that right clicking. A favorite is right click too all the time. If you're not sure any time, just right click. But one of the right clicks is that Select Previous. If you have a selection set in the previous command, or if you had selected something and you clicked out into the drawing window, you can hit the Control, back arrow, or the right click, and say Select Previous.

Just make sure that you don't hit Escape, because then the Select previous does not work. Because it only will work if you click in the drawing window and deselect things. Alternately also that you want to make some changes to elements, you don't have to filter just the floors and modify. Then select a lot of items. Select doors and modify any of the instance parameters.

But you can just select a bunch of elements together. And then underneath the type selector, under Common, drop that down, and select the type category. You want to change the instance parameters? Change it. Switch it to a next [INAUDIBLE]. Change it, furniture. This only works for instance parameters, by the way.

Also, another good time favorite that everybody knows are filters. So I always use this extensively as well. Along with there are some add-ins that can make your life so much easier by allowing you to select much more in-depth ways of selecting things.

The other one that I wanted to just point out is on your status bar. If you select multiple objects, this filter icon will give you the amount of elements that you have selected at that time. Another favorite of mine is basically your saving and loading, or your selection set. So you can [INAUDIBLE] selection sets and save them, and even apply visibility graphic overrides to those elements too. So here's another amazing tool functionality that Autodesk added to Revit a little bit back.

RINA SAHAY: All right, well, thank you, Nauman. And just to segue on your conversation about the filters, did anybody know that the icon for the filter toolbar was designed on the basis of the actual coffee filter?

So now, let's take a look at tips to be view master. In Revit, you build a virtual building. Then you walk around. And inside the building you have a little imaginary camera. You take pictures of various parts of the building that then you place on sheets.

Different cameras, different lenses, and yes, you got it. Different filters will give you control over the kind of view that is generated, and the information that it reports on the sheet. Let's take a look at some cases.

Graphic overrides. Let's take a really close look at the graphic overrides dialog box. This allows you to control the display of projection surfaces. It allows you to control the display, the line pattern, color, thickness, and the cut patterns of cut surfaces.

This allows you to actually select individual categories to half tone them. You can see a graphical representation of categories that are cuttable. So just as an FYI, specialty equipment is my favorite category, because it's not cuttable. It's my favorite uncuttable category. OK, let's put it that way.

When you cut a section through a specialty equipment element, you will not see any internal elements of it. So an uncuttable category will have the gray shaded area on it. Finally, you can assign appropriate detail levels to each category.

The capability to enable filters was first introduced in Revit 2021. It makes my life so much easier. Previously I would have to go in, turn off filters, maybe even remove filters from views that they were not required in. Now, I can build the same filter into every single view template.

And if it's not required in the view, all I need to do is go in and uncheck the box to enable filters. A different time saver. Halftone linked models, generally what we do in my organization is the MEP model, when it's linked in, it is halftone.

Let's take a look at how to set that up. Right now the example that I have up here shows how to halftone a furniture model. So I've got my filter created and named. I have selected the categories that exist in the furniture model. And I have not set up any filter rules.

What Revit's going to do is it's going to look at the link. It is going to look for these three categories, which live there in my furniture link. And it is going to then present them to me for the action that I require, which would be to halftone them.

A further tip to really fine tune this control over the linked model. In the view template under Revit Links, make sure that the linked model is set to display by host view.

A true story. A retail project where a separate model was created for equipment, for specialty equipment category families, and shopping carts were a part of that deal. Now, it was electrical that had the most to do with the equipment model. And they did not want to see the shopping carts in their views.

So for them, a filter was created to filter out the shopping carts by a part of the family name, as you can see here. So any family which has the word cart in the name will not be filtered.

Just as an interesting little footnote, now, you can see that Revit 2022 allows us to filter by phase created. I am ecstatic about that. To control the display of elements from a linked model, you would need to, first of all, control the linked model by host.

And then let's take a look at another true story where the owner required a sheet that showed demolished in red and retained equipment as halftoned, and new construction as being green. A phase override was set up in the host model. The architecture and equipment models were linked into the host model. And both of them also had the exact same phase graphic overrides created in them.

So these graphic overrides talk to each other, and were able to create the result that you see here. Without the corresponding graphic overrides created in the linked models this did not happen. I got incorrect results.

Now, this is something that I see happening all the time, where we have got linked models coming in. And we're going into the view template, into the link, and turning off grids and levels. Why not just go into the Manage Links dialog box? Grab your linked model. Go into Managed Worksets. And just make sure that your links, and your levels and grids work set is not open.

That would require a little bit of proactive housekeeping, making sure that the grids and levels are sitting on the correct work setting. Now, let's go into learning objective two. We are going to talk about workarounds. Because these workarounds have been developed in response to the challenges posed by the software.

So let's start off with schedule tricks. Conditional formatting. We already know that Revit 2020 started by striping schedules. In the schedule view Revit 2021 gave us the capability to actually stripe the schedules on the sheet itself. So much more legible.

However, what do you do in a situation where only specific items are required to be striped? In this situation, existing doors needed to be striped. There was a yes-no parameter set up for existing. And we have conditional formatting set up for our fields.

And the conditional formatting is driven by a formula which requires that the existing parameter be equal to yes. We have the background color set up. And if we uncheck the existing parameter, then we will see that the stripe will disappear.

Another case which happened where we had a toilet accessory schedule, and suddenly somebody realized at the end of everything that we need to have another editable field added to do so. In the schedule properties, went ahead, created a new parameter, made sure it was an instance based parameter, made sure it was associated to the right categories. What that did was that left us with an editable field that we could add information to.

Another true story where a template was being created for landscape. Scheduling the numbers for trees was easy. Scheduling the numbers, the quantities for ground cover was almost impossible, because you couldn't place so many thousands of tiny, little families on the sheet.

What was done was floor types were created for each kind of ground cover. And then we had a floor schedule created that would filter for the ground cover floor types. We had a parameter for ground cover per square foot. That would be a standard value that would be manually input for each floor. And then we created a formula.

The formula was area divided by ground cover per square feet. To neutralize the inconsistent units between area and ground cover, area was neutralized by multiplying it by 1. And since you can't have half a tree, or 1/10 of a tree, or 0.9 of a tree, we have taken this calculation and rounded it up.

Key schedules are the most widely used hack to create dumb schedules in Revit. Normally key schedules are created in a never used category. And a lot of times these schedules are pre-created in the template.

Now, this situation arose when we had two projects. One project had a newer version of the key schedule. And the other project they wanted to copy the newer schedule into their project. So when the copy was executed using Insert From File, Revit looked at the incoming schedules, went duplicate parameters, uh-uh, I don't want them, and just brought in a blank key schedule.

To neutralize this, one of the key schedules had to have all of its parameters renamed. Once the parameters were renamed, and the incoming key schedule came in absolutely flawlessly.

My personal favorite. It's time for a speaker favorite. Combined parameters. Combined parameters allow me to take the separate fields for width and height, for doors, combine them together in one field. I hide width and height. I create a combined parameter. I make sure that the correct separator is in place. And now, I see door size put together into one column. And this can have a variety of other uses.

Let's take a look at some family tricks. Firstly, where did the out of the box libraries go? This was a feature. We have a feature that was introduced starting Revit 2021 as an early access technology preview.

So we would need to go to Insert, to load Autodesk family. We can browse the family categories just as we used to with the library installed on a hard drive.

Now, here's an added capability. We can actually filter our search. It makes life so much easier. We can switch locations. And what that does is that allows me to search, possibly find families that are unique to different localities.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this. A disadvantage being that there may be usage of families which do not conform to office standards. They may not have office mandated parameters. They may not report correctly to the template schedules.

And in those cases, some BIM managers may choose to disable this feature. However, the overriding advantage of this feature is that there is no need for disk space to install and manage out of the box libraries.

A time saver alert. Open a Windows Explorer window. Click and drag the family directly on to your editor. Another time saver would be to look at the project browser, click and drag family types directly into your editor.

What if you want to make some minor tweaks, minor edits to a family without having to open it? You want to rename the family. You want to rename the family type. You want to duplicate family types. Maybe edit parameters.

Right click on the family type in the project browser. Go to Type Properties. And you will be able to delete text based or dimensional parameters.

Do you have a situation where you need to transfer materials between families and projects, projects and projects, families and families? In that case, you would use Transfer Project Standards. You would see the command in this form in the project, and in this form in the family.

This would bring up a dialog box, which would allow you to select the items that you need to copy over. When you select the items to copy over, you will be prompted. One prompt would be to either overwrite. The other prompt would be to add new.

If you select overwrite, then anything that you have with the same name in your project will be overwritten. If you select Add New, then only the new items which do not exist in your project will be added over. But what if you just want to transfer one material, one specific material between families?

Look for a piece of geometry that actually has the material added to it. Control-C, Control-V, and copy and paste that element into the destination family. The material will be transferred.

Maybe you've got special equipment families that need to have a model number embodied in them. And you would notice regular text does not show up in modeled families. You would need to take the text, maybe created as dumb text, maybe created as a generic annotation family, nest it into your furniture or specialty equipment, or whatever family it is. And you will see that information show up in the project.

Attempt to prevent model bloat. Because it did happen once where I had to resuscitate a model that had maybe 700 really complex office chairs in it. In order to prevent that, please remember, model families do not have to be 3D. A recommended workflow would be, have the 3D families for your SD models so that everything is nice, and pretty, and renderable.

Once you transition your model, or transition a copy of your model over to DD or SD, switch out the geometry in the families. You could eliminate it. Or at the very least, you could tell the 3D geometry to not be visible in any views.

Let's say if it's a CD model, I would take the 3D geometry and have it not visible in front, back, or left, or right views. Set the detail levels. And that will prevent the model from bloating. Any rendering or [? enscape ?] action should not take place in the CD model. It should take place in the SD model.

What about this where you want to create line styles that are a combination of text and lines? Just like what AutoCAD did? You would need to create a line based family with a formula driven parametric array. The text that you see, it could be text. It could be labels. Or it could be a nested symbol family.

Use match properties to change family types. Just remember that the family types that you switch over do need to be of the same category for this tip to work. You can place semi-smart section or elevation tags in drafting views.

To do that, save a copy of a section or elevation tag. Rename it. Cut and paste the labels. And then switch the category or the tag to View Reference. Load the newly created view reference tags into your project, and create a view reference type with those tags.

You can take those tags. Place them in drafting views. Place them in any other views. And they will reference the correct view as needed.

So with that, ladies and gentlemen, let us shimmy over to parameter magic. Shared parameters. This is something that can be mystifying. It can be intimidating.

A shared parameter file is simply a text file that jumps into control elements that need to be tagged or need to be scheduled. Now, even though it is a text file, you cannot, should not, must not open it in a text editor to edit it. It can only be created or edited via Revit.

The shared parameter file is normally created as a part of office standards. And normally there are very limited editing privileges allowed to the team. A tip, which I don't think that your BIM manager will thank me for, if you need to create a family, you don't have access to the shared parameters folder, or the shared parameters required are not in your folder, you can go ahead. Create your own little shared parameter file on your desktop.

Create the family. Load it into your project. Load it into the library. And nothing will be lost. Because the shared parameter file, it is helpful, but it is not essential to the life and health of your families and projects.

Global parameters. These are extremely powerful, because you can use a single parameter, and use it to control a variety of families, a variety of family types, and a variety of categories even.

In this example, you will see that the double doors and the single doors have different types. One type is being controlled by the global parameter. The other type is not. The pocket door, the entire pocket door, irrespective of type, is being controlled by the global parameters. And finally, the window, which is not even of the same category, that is also being controlled by the global parameter. Extremely powerful, very helpful, and it can stand a lot of use.

Let's take a look at some more superb tips. How to control line weights in wall types? This is something that I have seen being asked a lot in the Revit forums. How to control wall style line types in plan views, let us say.

You would need to go to the visibility graphic overrides. You would need to go to model categories, and down here go to override host styles. You would be able to override the function, the line weight, line color, and the line pattern of the wall styles.

Another question which I've been asked a lot by my own team members, why don't my wall finishes wrap at the end? To do so, the first thing you need to remember is all wall finishes need to live outside the core boundary layers.

And in addition to that, once that is done, make sure that default wrapping is set to exterior. Try setting default wrapping to interior. You would end up seeing some very, very strange results.

In the material editor you can actually add your favorite materials to a favorites list. So here, yeah, this is definitely my favorite material, right? It's Rina's awesome material. I could add it to a favorites list.

The favorites list will show up at the bottom. You would need to expand this part of the browser. And you would be able to see all the favorites that have been added to this list. And I could open up a different model and access the favorites through that model as well.

The use of the space bar. Not only does the space bar take placed family instances and flip them around at 90 degree angles, or 45 degree angles. You can use the space bar to align a family instance to an angle element. It could be a line. It could be a wall. It could be whatever. And place precisely aligned family instances.

My personal favorite. If anybody has told you that sweeps can go in three directions, please feel free to point and laugh at them. Here I have started with a wall. It's just a basic wall. I have edited the profile for that. And then I have gone into model in place to create a sweep.

To create a sweep, now for the path I'm using 3D edges. And as you can see, the 3D edges are going in every single direction. I place a profile, and then I accept the sweep.

Once I've accepted the sweep and I have exited the in-place modeling mode, I can delete the wall that I used as my foundation. And I am left with this lovely, really, really convoluted sweep that is doing just what I wanted it to do.

And with that, let's hand this over to Nauman. Nauman, this is your forte, isn't it? Tell us more about [INAUDIBLE] performance.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [INAUDIBLE]. My thing is about making sure Revit is running, and models are performing the best. As Rina had mentioned, I had presented some classes in the past [? called ?] [? Code Blue, ?] as well as [INAUDIBLE] keeping your models ripped as well. So I would like you to go ahead and check those out from past years.

But let's talk about for this session. And I'm going back to the Options bar again. And in the Options bar, under the user interface, you may want to turn off the structural analysis and tools. According to Autodesk this improves performance.

And even if you are a structural user, keeping this off while you are not using the structural analysis tools can speed up your models, especially when you have a lot of structural elements in your file. You can also reduce the clutter by turning off other elements, other analysis tools too, in this case.

The other item, I always have been tasked to is like why is my model running slow? Or when I sync. Or I get this error saying, oh, the model is not available.

Don't hit Cancel sometimes. Just let it be. It's just whatever, just waiting for it in the queue to kind of process your request. But one of the best ways to eliminate it is to change your work sharing update frequency to manual. That is under the General Options. And I would highly recommend that setting, especially if you are on a [INAUDIBLE] or on a [INAUDIBLE] drives, or any cloud drives as such, not BIM 360.

Now, some of the items about superb collaboration. To make sure things go smoothly I want to make sure that at least I recommend my team to make sure to have the latest and greatest desktop connector, as well as the latest, greatest Revit patch installed, and making sure all the computers are doing the same thing.

If there are any issues with your model, emptying the collaboration cache is a great solution to make sure-- you can't even open a model. Sometimes this can help. Sometimes your hard drive is getting bloated. You can empty the desktop connector cache.

All the instructions are in the handout, a little bit more detail there. But one of my favorite things, and we're going to mention in multiple times is to daily publish your models for backups for BIM 360. If you publish them daily, you have multiple versions to download. Or even actually on BIM 360, you could even compare those two models.

And at least turn on the auto publishing, which is a weekly session within the Autodesk BIM 360 design collaboration suite. Also, I would highly recommend teams to upgrade their projects to 2022 because there are amazingly wonderful upgrades associated with it.

But one of the items is that, well, with BIM 360, how do I do that? Well, in BIM 360, if you are a project admin, under services for document management, you will find this Revit cloud model upgrade. You can select the version of Revit you want to upgrade to, preferably '22.

And you have to first do a test. Then you can upgrade the model after reviewing all the errors, or any, if there is any errors. There will be, trust me-- to upgrade or not to upgrade.

Well, the other item-- I talked about the collaboration cache cleaning, but keeping your machine clean is the key. The ever ballooning temp folder. I know. If you call a tech support for an Autodesk, or even if you post a question and you get [INAUDIBLE] directly, one of us will say, oh, did you restart? Did you empty the temp folder?

Well, don't give them the opportunity to even ask that question, because you can say, hey, I did it. So make sure at least weekly you empty that. But if you have Windows 10, which hopefully you all have, or ask your IT team to enable this. Windows 10 added this extremely useful tool called storage sense. Basically turning that on, setting it at least, I recommend, every week, and deleting the temporary files that are a week old at least. You can set it to every day, for that matter. But I highly recommend setting that setting.

RINA SAHAY: You know, Nauman, the worst temp folder I ever saw had 1.2 million files in it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Ouch.

RINA SAHAY: And the user was wondering why their machine was crawling, yeah.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so if you are making sure that your models are clean as well. I mean, your computers, as well as your models. So for file based work sharing, I would say, make sure that you create new locals.

I know [INAUDIBLE], the Revit project manager. He used to say a local file a day keeps the tech support away. So I mean, and I can attest to that.

And for BIM 360, make sure to publish Revit models weekly. And if you don't, the problem is you have to revert the whole thing back. Rina will talk a little bit more detail.

Weekly audit all your project files. Make sure to select [INAUDIBLE]. I mean, get the high hitters, like groups, and the images, and also the model families as well. And then compact [INAUDIBLE] the warnings, and trying to keep them to a minimum is a great way to kind of keep your model lean, and clean, and speedy, as such.

Also, my favorite, another topic that I always get is groups. And it just-- you love to hate them, trust me. They are a great tool. But just make sure that you follow some of the rules when you are working with groups, especially with model rules. Like maybe heights of all walls unconnected. And there are a couple other items that are very a no-no, which is mirroring the groups, or avoiding the nested group within detail groups.

And another absolute must, make sure don't constrain dimensional elements within a group, or use split face as well.

RINA SAHAY: All right.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Now, Rina.

RINA SAHAY: Let me segue on this now. And let me tell you about some of our favorite errors.

This just happened yesterday when I was putting my finishing touches to the slide deck, where something had been done in the current version of the model which should not have been done. And some good things needed to have been brought out of one older model. Some other good things needed to have been brought out of another older model.

So what I had to do was in BIM 360 I had to go to the version history. I had to download the source files actually for these two versions. Downloaded them down to our drives. Both of the models were compared and consolidated. A new file was created. And it was re-uploaded. So once again, please, please, please, publish every day so that if you have to backpedal to an older version, or you have to retrieve old information, you don't have to go too far.

Other things that may happen. You are opening a BIM 360 model. You're just stuck at the Open Model dialog box. When you click Show or Hide Details, you are going to see information about the status of the linked models, whether they are downloading, or loading, or not.

A lot of times corruption in a linked model will show up right in the stage. So if you see that, you would need to look at the linked models and address the errors. Once the errors are addressed, the links are cleaned up. They are reloaded. Your model should open.

There were a couple of errors that came up, where true story. I came back from vacation. And all the models of a project would not open.

The second error that came up in a different project-- it was a mechanical project, where a single family instance would not move, copy, or rotate. The other family instances would work.

You couldn't delete the bad instance. You couldn't do anything to it. So to resolve these, the BIM 360 central models were recreated by publishing the model to get the latest and greatest version, downloading the source files, and then using that to recreate central.

Nauman, back to you. Back to your pet peeve.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, my pet peeve, another one is, besides the group, is CAD. Oh, my God, this is just my biggest pet peeve.

I mean, basically the rule is don't import CAD period into the project or families. I mean, there are instances where you have to. I mean, especially if you are bringing in 3D models, but try to keep it to a minimum, and cleaned up as well.

But let's say if you do import a CAD file for some reason. Do not explode it. It causes a lot of problems. I do tech support on directly for Autodesk. And most of my files that were corrupted had the problem of exploded CAD.

Well, the other problem is that in linked CAD also make sure to clean them up. Don't bring in a 10 MB, or 20 MB, 30 MB CAD file and say, oh, my Revit is not working. Right, so you know what the reason is. You need to clean that up.

Remove unnecessary CAD as well, and organize your CAD on work sets, as well as break it up into sections if you have 3D linked models. Also, never, ever-- as I said, never, ever explode DWG files.

One of the clients had such a slow model. And they were having a huge issue with it. We used this format. But we used delete [INAUDIBLE] line and ports. It's like 23,000 line patterns.

You can also use pyRevit to clean them up as well. It's a great tool. Rina will go over a little bit more detail, cause that's her favorite tool.

RINA SAHAY: [INAUDIBLE]

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: And some of my other, as I said, we just showed you about deleting imported line [INAUDIBLE]. Some companies don't allow installing add-ins. You can use Dynamo to clean up your model very quickly, as well as delete import line patterns too.

I'll also be sharing my personal utility as well for the session. I also have, like if you want to not load any of the plug-ins, I have a quick file in the materials where you can launch Revit without any of the add-ins loaded at all. I call it the Revit in safe mode.

Magical troubleshooting powers. The pyRevit, I mean, as I said, you can clean up a lot of stuff. But just be careful in using these tools, because you can wipe many things. But be careful and understand some of my favorite ones are these imported line patterns, and move all materials on the render elements.

So all the render, like the AutoCAD, exploded CAD, render materials can be wiped very quickly with this. And it also allows you to do quick family checks. If there is a family error, it would point that out.

There was a huge issue about family corruption. And there still is. But just make sure that you are checking your model for family corruptions once in a while. With that, Rina, it's your favorite.