Extra Purge Items

[Chad Smith]

The purge command should purge these extra items:

Fill Patterns
Materials
Object Styles
Line Styles
Line Patterns

[Scott Hopkins]

I definitely agree with the purging the materials list. Once you have the basic design and materials set for your project, the length of the materials list becomes a real bear to scroll through. Deleting materials one by is too much of a waste of time to be bothered with. The ability to purge unused materials would certainly be nice.

The ideal scenario I think would be to have a small list of used materials stored in the project file and then have a large categorized library of unused materials stored outside of the project. Combine this with an easy to use interface where you could drag and drop swatches of desired materials into the project and you would really have something.

[beegee]

I like the sound of that. Something like an add and remove dialogue maybe ?

[Steve_Stafford]

Scott...what I thought of as I read your post is a filter toggle to restrict the display to just those used or not. Then a button to purge unused.

Interesting idea!

[Scott Hopkins]

Steve,

Good One! I like the filter toggle idea a lot. I don't know how much file space materials take up. Maybe it is not that much and a filter toggle is really all that is needed. I am guessing that it would be really easy to implement. Hopefully the development team could get it right so at the beginning of every Revit session the toggle didn’t continually reset back to "all materials shown".

On the other hand, a separate user file with categories and color material swatches might be really nice as well. I think the whole idea of storing materials only within the project file might be fundamentally flawed. Once you have several projects under your belt it can be a pain to open up each project looking for the material you made 9 months ago. Actually the same goes for complex wall types. Don’t get me wrong, I think that materials and wall types used in the project file absolutely need to be saved within the project file.

Also, how about a more defined naming convention for materials? Is it really necessary to have metal materials in two different places? (Finishes - exterior - metal panels) & (Metal - panel). I think the material categories that come with Revit are a good first shot, but they could use some work/simplification. When ever I make a new material I have to sit there for a minute and debate with myself what to call it, or try to remember what I might have called it on a previous project.

[Autodesk Revit]

Definitely required, especially the materials - if we dont get this , my template file will be a monster in a few years!

[Phil Palmer]

When you have imported a dwg file you also seem to end up with LOADS of materials from them of RGB X Y Z and the list just gets enormous.
A purge materials command would be great !

[PeterJ]

Whoever posted this last message we have a problem that the people behind the board are trying to resolve that seems to exist when people follow links back to the zoogdesign fourm by mistake. You probably didn't even see it on screen, but when viewing links back to older topics you should watch that you remain logged in as yourself (it always shows at top right of the screen) to avoid these apparently anonymous posts.

[Martin P]

It was me, I wondered what had happened!