Combine Revit Families without nesting them

[c54S4DF]

Hi Everyone,

I am a Mechanical and Electrical Consultant Engineer who is relatively new to Revit and new to the forum.

I have received a Lift Family from a supplier and I want to simplify it as the level of detail within this Family is not required.

The family currently has families nested within families and families nested within those families all the way down to families even for the wall brackets. I want to remove the holes in these wall brackets as they are not necessary for my level of modelling.

I want to combine some of these families into one without nesting them to reduce the file size as the Lift Family is currently over 30,000KB. I also want to do this so I can add Parameters to the family such as the Lift Car Travel Distance which will then determine the length of the Guide Rails and the Number of Wall Brackets needed. 

Is it possible to combine these families together so the extrusions in each family is now in only one family?

I hope this makes sense.

I look forward to your replies.

[HVAC-Novice]

You probably have to start from scratch and avoid nesting dolls. Maybe you can have all the nested families in one (different types controlled with visibility).  Maybe you can recycle some of the nested families after you cleaned them up.

My personal goal  I don't always achieve is 500kB for simple families and 2MB for complex ones with nesting. If the family has really useful functions you can have more. but 30MB sounds like overkill. 

[iainsavage]

Its probably much easier to keep the nesting and simplify each sub-family, or delete and purge any sub-families which you don't need.

Recreating the guide rails in your main family should be a simple task if you want to do that, or you can map your travel distance parameter to the guide rail length in the sub-family.

If you want to automatically adjust the number of brackets based on travel distance then the method of doing that is to use a parametric linear array but the bracket component in the array would be a nested family to make this work, so your stuck with nesting for that element.

You could also ask the manufacturer if they maybe have a family at a lower level of detail (LOD) - some manufacturers have recognised the need for this at design stage and provide alternative versions.

Personally I think recreating all of the sub-family parameters, planes, dimensions, constraints and identification data in the host family would be very time consuming.

Also although 30 megabyte is excessive for a family, in Revit terms that's probably quite small in relation to the project file which might be 200 MB to 1GB or larger and as far as I'm aware having multiple instances of a family in the project file is not additive in the same way as blocks in Autocad, so if you have 10 instances placed in the project it shouldn't result in 300 MB addition to the project file size (you could easily test that).

Hope this helps.

[axad1993 · Accepted solution]

Yes, it is possible to combine families in Revit to simplify and reduce the file size.

One way to do this is to use the "Load into Project" option when loading the families into your project. This will allow you to select and merge multiple families into a single family.

Another way is to use the "Edit Family" option to open the family in the Family Editor. Once in the Family Editor, you can select multiple extrusions and use the "Combine" command to merge them into a single extrusion. You can then delete the original extrusions that you no longer need.

It is also possible to use the "Edit Family" option to remove the holes in the wall brackets, or any other unneeded details, from the family. You can also add new Parameters to the family as you need and control the length of the guide rails and number of wall brackets.

Keep in mind that any changes made to a family will affect all instances of that family in the project, so it's a good idea to make a backup copy of the original family before making any changes.

It's also important to note that some families might be protected and it may not be possible to edit them.