Standardizing Material Library

[courtlandtgross]

My office is trying to create a uniform system for Materials, Drafting and Model Patterns, Filled Regions and detail components. I was assigned the task of putting all of these elements into proper csi classifications. What we have found is that any time a new family comes into the project, its materials get added to the list in an undesirable way. Is there any feature that prevents new materials from being added to your material library, filled region library? If not, It would be very nice to have a find and replace tool that would clean up your models, just like replace font works in some other software suites. luckily the extraneous materials are added to the end of the list, because they don't start with a csi number, but we'd prefer to not have these in the project altogether. Any Ideas? Our firm has about 1,827 families and 1,300 detail components so I'd prefer not to standardize all of the materials manually ;)

[cphubb]

My office is trying to create a uniform system for Materials, Drafting and Model Patterns, Filled Regions and detail components. I was assigned the task of putting all of these elements into proper csi classifications. What we have found is that any time a new family comes into the project, its materials get added to the list in an undesirable way. Is there any feature that prevents new materials from being added to your material library, filled region library? If not, It would be very nice to have a find and replace tool that would clean up your models, just like replace font works in some other software suites. luckily the extraneous materials are added to the end of the list, because they don't start with a csi number, but we'd prefer to not have these in the project altogether. Any Ideas? Our firm has about 1,827 families and 1,300 detail components so I'd prefer not to standardize all of the materials manually ;)

We started out by editing all of our family templates and setting the default materials the way we wanted. We also have assigned a Master Format number to each material as a project parameter allowing for us to better sort and access our Material Takeoffs.

Recently we found the Revit DBLink exports the materials list from the project. We are now using Access to query and update all of our materials long with creating material reports of what materials are in use. We are finding this better and more accessible than the Material Takeoffs in Revit. Query your model elements against the material table to see what is in use.

Note: you cannot update or delete materials from the list only update. Get your list worked out and update information in Access.

[courtlandtgross]

I'm finding that if I merge project standards from my correctly organized material template into a detail component the file size jumps 4x. I just created a wood decking line based detail component, and If i'd like to coordinate its fill pattern with the wood I used in my projects, it involves loading all fill patterns and filled region types. it would sure be nice to have the ability to load filled regions on an individual basis. loading all filled regions caused the file size to jump from 164k -> 524k, which seems a little heavy for a file that only contains a filled region and a thickness parameter. Any ideas about managing these elements would be great. thanks -Court