Object styles, materials, families...

[clog boy]

Object styles, materials and families are as interconnected as the Earth, water and sky. Every now and then it's a good idea to purge unused families, but for our basic template we'd also like to purge object styles and materials. Is there a good way to controll this, without practically re-building our library or lose control over the presentation of the model?
Help appreciated.

[dhurtubise]

There is no automatic way to purge Object Styles and Materials. So you would have to do it manually, so i wouldn't bother with that.

[clog boy]

You wouldn't.

[cphubb]

We deleted the extra materials and object styles early on in our template process. We now have a seperate template for materials that we maintain as our standard material library. We use the Transfer project standards to move them into a project and clean them each time. Good news is that additional materials created in the project a untouched. Bad news is if you maintain 400 materials you will need to delete many for each project. I have been looking for a better solution for some time. Maybe something with the API.

[clog boy]

Looks like we're heading that way too, except we didn't delete much materials yet. I think we're going to delete as much as possible and rely on the consistency of our family library to gain control over object styles and such.
This toughens implementation tho.

Thanks for your reply.

[The Sweg]

If I knew then what I know now.....

If I had to set up Revit in an office from scratch, now understanding the whole material / object style / family library set up, I would first define all materials that I could reasonably conceive of using in one drawing and use that to transfer standards from into my families as I created them. Same thing really, with object styles. I have four different "Exterior White" materials because I didn't know in the beginning that I could transfer materials from one project into another (or into a family) and I didn't type them exactly the same each time, one has a dash, one has a space, then a dash...you get the picture. Thinking about fixing it and all my families and reloading everything seems too daunting to tackle. And the thought of re-creating our template --uggghh!

Hindsight, I guess....

[clog boy]

I think the important thing to realise is that object styles always should obtain their material 'by category', to avoid duplication of materials. It is essential tho that windows all maintain the same object styles (using a window template with the rough outlines already drawn).