3500 warnings down to 2

We recently had one of our Revit projects go in for planning, and as it is likely to go on and be a Architecture / Structure Revit coordinated project in Design Development, I thought it would be worth doing an in-house File audit.

It’s a high rise apartment building in one of the trendy parts of town. The building it-self is relatively simple and the file is also relatively young, being only about 2 months old.

To my surprise there were 3500 warnings in the file. It made me aware very quickly that I need to spend some time with the users to educate them on how to fix warnings and the benefits of doing so.

I was determined to get the warnings down, as I don’t see how well our coordination with the Engineers would work, if the file at this early stage had so many error warnings.

It took me about 16 hours to get the 3500 warnings down to 2 warnings (It’s very satisfying to say that). For those interested the file size was 52MB before I started and at the end it was 5.5MB smaller. It sounds a lot but it was 3500 errors, so really the file size is not hugely affected by warnings unless you have several thousand of them. However the processing time is. The model seems to work very well now.

This is really a statement that you can eliminate 99% of error warnings, and it really doesn’t take too much time and effort (have a read of some of my posts on warnings posted in the past few weeks). Your model will work so much better, walls will join and trim properly, rooms will bound properly, you won’t have clashes with doors and walls, Ramps and Stairs will be the right length, Tags will work properly, Rooms, areas and doors won’t have duplicate numbers, Elements won’t be at odd angles to the axis planes, walls won’t clash and you won’t have two elements in the same place.

To me, that’s just the type of building we all want to build.

Let the warnings work for you, and not against you.

Some additional finds:

A group, filled region and masked region with an error won’t indicate the warning symbol in the options bar when selected. You need to be in the elements edit mode and select the sketch to see the warning symbol.

Use groups cleverly. Don’t create groups out of lines when they should have been a detail component in the first place. Ensure model groups are independent (ie you are not relying on elements outside the group to make elements in the group work). Disallow wall joins of walls in the group to walls outside the group. Review the warnings in the group before finishing the group mode.

Fix items that are slightly off axis straight away. As soon as you have one off axis, Revit will snap to it and soon you may find the first one is now joined by another 20 items slightly off axis.