Managing Revit projects can feel like playing detective. Your model sync time is dragging, and you need to figure out what happened and who caused it. Was it the team member using an outdated Revit version? Or maybe someone imported the wrong content?
Autodesk Model Analytics (AMA) makes it easy to do the detective work and identify what's causing your Revit project to lag.
Culprit #1: Large File Size
Once a Revit file crosses a certain threshold in file size, it can make Revit operate significantly slower than usual. One way to ensure that Revit performs at its absolute best for you and your team is by keeping an eye on file size.
AMA can help you monitor file size by providing clear data on which models have received a significant jump in file size. You'll learn the date the jump happened, which model was upgraded, and its file size.
You can then go to that specific Model and view:
All syncs for that Model
Information on the users who worked on it and their Revit version
File size
Sync time, date, and time
This helps you identify what caused the significant leap in file size and fix it if necessary.
Culprit #2: Team Members Using Different Versions of Revit
Another culprit for a lagging Revit project is when team members are using different minor versions of Revit. If multiple users on a project are working with different minor versions of Revit, it could cause a project to crash.
To help you identify and fix this issue, ANA can give you information on who's using which version of Revit.
You can see who's using which Revit version for a particular model and contact the appropriate person to have them upgrade their Revit installation.
Culprit #3: In-Place Families
One problem you'll want to tend to immediately in a project is the overuse of in-place families. These should be used sparingly, but due to their ease of use, rampant placement of in-place families is a common pitfall among Revit users.
Not only are in-place families larger in file size than properly built Revit families, but they also make an entirely new entity of themselves each time they're copied (rather than referencing the information from the first instance).
To fix this, you'll want to identify these in a project and replace them with Revit families. AMA can help you do this by giving you a breakdown of the types of families in your project. You can also see a breakdown of each element and whether it's an in-place family.
Culprit #4: CAD Imports
CAD imports can also cause some serious problems in a project. A user should never have CAD imports in a file. There may be certain situations when a user might be converting CAD details into Revit, but all of that should be done in a separate file to avoid corruption with line styles or other components.
AMA helps list these out for you so that you can quickly find them in a project and remove them.
Culprit #5: Improper Import of Images
Improper import techniques and the use of images can wreak havoc on file size and performance. To keep this from happening, you'll want to find any images that may be imported multiple times or are no longer in use.
If you see an image frequently placed in a project, then it might be beneficial to make it a part of a Revit family so that the image can be taken out of the main model.
In AMA, you can see all of your images in a project and the number of instances placed to determine whether you need to make adjustments.
Culprit #6: Plan Regions Not Created as Dependent Views
A best practice that tends to get missed with Revit 101 classes is that views with required plan regions should be created as dependent views. If the plan region updates, all views are properly updated. If plan regions are instead copied from view to view, any updates within the plan region are not carried forward to the copied views.
AMA can help you see exactly where plan regions may exist in a project so that you can address those immediately.
Compare Changes
Sometimes, when you're looking at these issues, you need to determine if it was one specific change that threw things off. That's when it helps to use AMA's Compare Changes tool, which provides you with a clear display of the total number of changes made on each date.
You can select any dot on this graph to get a list of all changes that were made on that date and who made those changes.
Since this provides you with all information on recent changes (and in an easy-to-organize format), you can consider it your own built-in security camera for a project. You can go back and quickly access "footage" of what happened and reach out to that individual to correct the changes, if necessary.