Where did all these junk line styles and render materials come from???

[patricks]

I'm working on a very small project, just a small interior renovation of a huge retail building and warehouse. The model of the overall existing building is sparse - perimeter walls and roof plus a few interior walls. The renovation is just a few walls, ceiling and lights, and some furniture. Couple of doors. Hardly anything.

Yet my list of line types has stuff like RED, YELLOW, GREEN, STRUCTURAL-K BRACE, TITLEBLUE, TITLEYELLOW, SITE-FLOW, so on and so forth. Materials lists a bunch of "BMCD2AR3" materials. None of these are in my template.

I looked through all my loaded families, of which there are only a few beyond what was in the template. I opened and edited all the ones I loaded for the project, and found only one suspect furniture family made from an imported 3D CAD block. I tried loading that family into a new blank project file, and it brought in only a couple of the BMCD2AR3 materials, and none of those weird line styles. It did create a few entries under the "Imports In Families" VV tab.

It's acting like it does when a CAD file is exploded. But there are no CAD files in the project at all, never have been at any point.

Where could all these line styles and materials have come from? It's frustrating to suddenly have all these junk line styles showing up in the middle of my list when I'm drawing lines. Makes it much harder to find the ones I need.

[MikeJarosz]

Where did your families come from? Betcha some of them have Acad-inside! A lot of so-called Revit family files are Acad files that were imported into the family editor. I have a project that has line styles in hangul! (Korean).

[patricks]

Where did your families come from? Betcha some of them have Acad-inside! A lot of so-called Revit family files are Acad files that were imported into the family editor. I have a project that has line styles in hangul! (Korean).

I checked every single family in the project that wasn't in the template. One furniture family was made from a 3D CAD block, and had a couple of those Accurender materials in them. But not the whole big chunk of those materials I ended up with! I even opened that family, exploded the CAD block (which made the 3D geometry disappear), and still did not end up with all the junk line styles.

So it wasn't that I don't think. A bunch of the line styles had names having to do with site elements like property lines and such. But I'm not doing anything site related on this project, and have not loaded any site-related families. I even checked another small project, which had the big chunk of Accurender materials also. I copied a drafting view in from that project, so I tried copying that same drafting view into a new project. Nope, no effect on the line styles or materials in the new project.

Seems to be a mystery!

[Duncan Lithgow]

I had a problem with mystery Line Patterns and Materials coming from seemingly nowhere. Do DWG Linetypes in files inside Families get imported into the Revit Project? Is this Line *Styles* or maybe Line Patterns we're talking about?

[patricks]

I had a problem with mystery Line Patterns and Materials coming from seemingly nowhere. Do DWG Linetypes in files inside Families get imported into the Revit Project? Is this Line *Styles* or maybe Line Patterns we're talking about?

Line Styles. In the project I was looking under Additional Settings > Line Styles to remove the junk styles. But in a family, those line styles are controlled by Object Styles.

I went through and opened every single family that I loaded in the project, beyond what was in the template, and found no junk line object styles, and that one Bed family only had a couple of junk render materials (not the whole list that found its way into my project).

It's almost as if the project was "infected" with junk.

[david_peterson]

I know i got a bunch of stuff inserted when I picked on the Site Designer Tools.
Better Questions is can you purge it.
Someone could have been inserted and exploded a Cad File. :veryevil:
Just a thought. If that's the case it's going to be very hard to find it.

[MikeJarosz]

I wasn't joking! (OK - maybe it's Chinese, not Korean)

[amorie]

Did anyone bring in a view template from another file? We've discovered that is an effective way to bring in lots of garbage into a file that has nothing to do with actual loaded family content, linked files, etc.

[Duncan Lithgow]

bring in a view template...

If you mean by 'bring in' use of the Transfer Project Standards tool, then yes you can fill your project with all the setting from another project. That's what it's for, but it must be used with caution by someone who knows the implications.

You raise an interesting question. If I use TPS to transfer View Templates, do I also get any Line Styles and their Line Patterns that are used in the View Template? I'll have to check that one some time.

[amorie]

Yes, I did mean using Transfer Project Standards to copy a view template into a file. Our experience is that line styles do get transferred if they are set to be visible in the view template. They apparently don't need to be in use. We discovered that recently on a view template transfer to update our template file with some tested view templates in a test project. Our suspicions were confirmed after tests on several different files.

[Duncan Lithgow]

... if they are set to be visible in the view template. They apparently don't need to be in use.

What do you mean by 'visible' & 'in use'. How can some thing be visible but not in use? I find that we need to be very specific about language use with Revit. They use terms oddly and very specifically, that's why I'm just trying to be sure I understand you.

[patricks]

No, no one else has worked on the file other than me, and no view templates were brought in, nor have any CAD files even been brought into the project much less exploded.

[amorie]

Duncan, what I meant by "in use" was the existence of an object. In this case, the view doesn't need to have a line of a specific linetype placed in the view that is being controlled by a view template.

[Duncan Lithgow]

Duncan, what I meant by "in use" was the existence of an object. In this case, the view doesn't need to have a line of a specific linetype placed in the view that is being controlled by a view template.

Got it! Thanks. A similar example is when inserting a detail group from outside into a project. Even while the Detail Group is not placed anywhere in the model, it's still in the model file, so its Text Types, Line Styles etc can't be purged, some things can't even be recognized as in the file by various tools for selecting an element. For example when cleaning up in non-standard Line Styles.