How big should a Revit family be allowed to be on disk?
It’s a bit of a difficult question to answer because size becomes arbitrary if it doesn’t fulfil it function. This might also wildly vary by Revit category.
Things to avoid:
There are many reasons why some families may be big but it’s just a reminder to check what size your families are. Your decisions might hurt project performance. Remember every kilobyte of file size roughly equals 20 Kilobytes of memory usage.
It’s a bit of a difficult question to answer because size becomes arbitrary if it doesn’t fulfil it function. This might also wildly vary by Revit category.
Things to avoid:
- DWG imports, or any other imports for that matter
- Exploded dwg’s, converted to revit, copy pasted to a clean family can still contain many lines which hurt performance
- Voids
- Nested nested nested nested nested families
- Unused parametrization
- Create the uber family
Things to do
- Use native Revit geometry
- Purge, Purge and Purge
- Consider who needs this information and what does (s)he need
- Reference to information outside the Revit model
- Fill in the metadata
So let’s start with a general rule of thumb, including lame cat images 🙂
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Filesize
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Comment
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lame cat picture
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Between 0 and 212 KB
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Really? That’s smaller than the smallest metric template
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Between 212 and 512 KB
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Well done, is it useful?
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Between 512 and 1024 KB
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Good size
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.jpg?resize=200%2C124) |
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Between 1024 and 2048 KB
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It’s not allways easy to keep the filesize down
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.jpg) |
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Between 2048 and 4096 KB
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Uhh are you sure everything needs to be in?
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.jpg) |
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Between 4096 and 8192 KB
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It’s getting seriously heavy now. What are you trying to do?
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Bigger than 8196 KB
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WTF!
What did you all import in this family?
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Revit family size