Doing a little house cleaning

[mthurnauer]

My current project has inherited a bunch of garbage and I am not sure where it has come from. I want to purge out a ton of line styles, fill patterns, line patterns, materials, etc. None of these are things that can be done with the purge dialog. There are a few types of materials I have always been curious about. It seems like legacy data. Is there any danger in purging out materials that start with RenderMaterial/..... or /Accurender..... We are not using accurender and I suspect this is baggage from imported old families. If I blow away all of the RenderMaterial/... stuff, will it cause issues with my rendering? We are still in 2011.

[cliff collins]

I'd get rid of all that old legacy Accurender stuff. You are correct, it comes from old families--back to pre-Mental Ray render engine releases--around 2008 or so.

If you have those Materials applied to alot of elements, you will need to replace them with the new MR Protein 2 Materials ( new versions from 2010 on, etc. ).

The line styles also come in from Autocad imports. You can usually delete them and not have too much to worry about--especially if you are not using a lot of lines.

Those families contain .dwg files and really slow down Revit. Try to keep it as clean as possible, and make sure those families and .dwg don't sneak back into the project.

[mthurnauer]

How about BMCDAR2\Solid Materials\.....?
Any harm in blowing them away?

[cliff collins]

Those are old Accurender Materials--thus the BMCD "AR2" naming. I'd get rid of them.
But like I said, if any of your elements have that material applied, you may need to re-apply
the newer Revit materials.

[mthurnauer]

My thinking is that unless it would make the model unstable somehow, I would prefer to probably go as far as I can with removing unwanted materials, line types, fill patterns, etc. If the geometry is still there, but I need to reassign materials and object styles, then at least a decision was made about what is applied and what categories things are assigned.

[LP Design]

I suggest you set up several 3D views for rendering (if you don't have them already) before you start purging. Sych/save, then purge out as much as you want. Once that is done, run a small low quality render on each view. That should help identify any glaring errors such as brick rendering flat gray. I believe that whenever you delete a material Revit applies "by category" or "default" depending on where the material occurred, so any problems should show up gray.

The only place I might be a little more cautious is if you have a lot of embedded families that you will be rendering, such as office furniture. Otherwise you should be fine. If it turns out that you deleted too many materials and that it would be a major pain to go back through and add them, you still have the option of close-without-save and starting the process again.

-LP