Efficient Processing Speed for Large Revit File Needed

[TimR7272]

Hello Everyone,

My coworkers and I are are currently working on a Revit project with an enormous file size. In short, our project is sited on one story of a 30-story building. The entire building is in our project as a shell file, provided by another party. Additionally, the level of detail provided in the file is extraordinary. Every conceivable aspect of a multi-story building is included: mechanical, plumbing, electric, structure, etc. Even though all but one of the building's levels are irrelevant, we are still working within this whole building.

My question is: how can we keep working with the entire building, but not force Revit to process every facet of the building as we build our project, causing the efficiency of our work to be slowed down?

For example, when creating (or duplicating) a new floor plan view, the crop region extends out to what seems like a mile in every direction. Cropping the floor plan down to just our project takes an unnecessarily long time to process. The same principle applies to creating sections and interior elevations. To create said drawings, crop regions are automatically extended to the outer edges of the entire building and, again, takes a long time to crop the section or interior elevation down to what we need.

Additionally, there are pieces to the skyscraper shell file that are placed in the middle of our site (doors, partitions, furniture) we don't want to delete but become automatically hidden when we need to produce a new drawings. These are things that, in reality, will not be built and were only drawn hypothetically by the outside party.

Other actions ours that have become extremely slow:
- Opening the file from our server to begin work.
- Zooming in and out in paper space.
- Updating information in title blocks.
- Opening a sheet from the Project Browser.
- Relocating section and interior elevation markers.
- Printing/creating PDFs of sheets

If you have some insight on how to make our file run fast and efficiently, it will be greatly appreciated by me and my coworkers.

Thank you!

[arch_kashif]

May God help you.
About creating new views, call outs and interior elevation, you can numerically control the limits of your new view on the time when you place the call out and section marker.
About hiding some elements of the building model, you can save template from one good view with every aspect of hiding categories, and apply that same template to every new view of the same type, many of the settings are then not required to be manually tweeked.
For such a huge original model i would not start working in it, rather work in a separate file with the main model as a link, and i will keep the linked file turned off untill i really need it like for final printing or major coordination issues.

[david_peterson]

What kind of computer specs do you have?
Are they sending you updated versions of that model or are you working in a theoretical "Existing" building?
If it's to be looked at as existing and you aren't getting updated versions, I'd suggest making a copy of the original project file and strip out what you don't need. Maybe you keep the floor above and below and delete everything else.
Option 2 would be to unload the link when not needed.
I'm currently on a 1.4 million sqft project. I'm doing the structure all in one model. There's 16 Arch links, 40 MEP links and 5 Process models. I generally never have them all loaded. I could if I want, but why bother. I'm only going to be working on one area of the building at a time generally.

[Craig_L]

The problem with multi-discipline files like this, is every time you do a function, it recalculates (for example, it checks that all your vents connect and recalcs all the air flows).
It may be as simple as setting up your plans and models to use overlaid views, which have had elements from different disciplines isolated out/in as required, same with the 3D model if you turn the things off you don't need to see you might get some speed up.

I believe there is a way to disable certain calcs from happening every time, although I've not needed to do this for a long time, and so I can't advise how you set this.

Really this is one of the main reasons seperate models is preferable (among other valid reasons) but seperate models solves this usually.

[staceyrdbrown]

Not sure if you're still trying to speed things up, but I've been doing the following for a project that's been crashing my computer. I'm not sure they'll help you (or that you still need help).

1. If you haven't already, turn your model into a central model. Put the model on its own workset so that if you don't need to be in it you can "unload" from your file without derailing everyone else.

2. Set up a few consistent few templates that you can use - e.g. a floor plan and a roof plan. Get your view settings the way you like them, and then turn off the model in your big plans. The speed difference in panning is fantastic. When it's time to print, just flick the workset back on!

3. If you need to see something from your giant plan view, try using a callout. Some things like beams and walls won't draw in a callout, but you can roughly place them and then align in the callout in less time than the view would have taken to load.

4. Limit the number of open windows. Revit draws them all.

5. When messing with sheets, take advantage of worksets again. Turn off absolutely everything you don't need. Titleblocks are always a little clunky, but if it's not drawing everything else it should help.

6. Make sure you're doing regular maintenance and compacting the file - it's kind of like defragmenting the disk. Also, if you're decently far along in the project, purge all of your extra elements.

Hope that helps!