April 16, 2012

Read This Before You Hit Delete…

(…or what you need to know about level hosted elements in Revit)

How could these (fill-in-the-blank) just disappear from the project? They were there yesterday, and now they’re gone!

We don’t see this happening too often, perhaps once per month, but when it does, it’s a disaster. The BIM Manager usually assumes that Revit has a serious defect and is responsible for trashing the project while our support staff is inclined to assume that some user, unbeknownst to the BIM Manager, decided to randomly delete things and then not fess up. The truth is typically halfway between the two.

The culprit is the lowly level line which, when deleted, will take with it any object that it hosts. The kicker is that Revit won’t even warn you. Losing elements in a project can create days of lost effort. This is why auditing your level lines is Tip #4 from our Revit Project Auditing process.

Training staff to not create their own level lines (this should be the domain of the BIM Manager or Project Manager only) will help avoid this problem in the first place, but if you do encounter extraneous level lines, watch this Ideate Explorer for Revit video before you delete any levels!


See all of our Top Ten Auditing Tips for Revit Projects.

Ideate Explorer for Revit is an essential tool for Revit BIM Managers and is the best way to audit your Revit projects. To learn more visit us at www.ideateexplorer.com



Glynnis Patterson is a registered architect and the Director of Software Development at Ideate, Inc. In a previous life Glynnis spent many hours looking at blueprints with a scale, highlighters, and a scratch pad to develop detailed cost estimates.