Revit Model Clean-Up

Keep your file size down by removing unneeded families
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
If you have been testing families and then using different ones you might want to eliminate those you no longer need. TO do that, Revit has a simple option. Just go to the Manage Tab and click Purge Unused.


A dialog will open and you will be able to select one by one the families and groups you want to purge (or you can alternatively select ALL unused and purge them).


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SketchUp Plugins: Face Number Reduction

Reduce the number of faces in your model using this easy to use plugin. It will speed up your working time and improve render speed.
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
POLYGON REDUCER (polyreduce.rb) is a SketchUp plugin to reduce the number of faces of SketchUp objects. It is useful especially when we use high poly models imported in our model or when we simply want some surfaces to be simpler and lighter. Below you can see a simple comparison of an object created with the Torus plugin before and after using the polyreduce with the face count on the left.


Above the initial object before using the Plugin. Below the object after running the Polyreduce plugin.


As you can see above, sometimes the object will not look so smooth as before running the plugin. This has an easy solution. We run the Soften Edges function and we can control again which edges are shown and which ones are hidden achieving a better result as it can be seen below.


To use the plugin you must select the faces you want to simplify. Then right click and select "Polyreduce" from the context menu. On the dialog box, you can select the percentage of reduction you want to use. Very useful Plugin!

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SketchUp Plugins: Simplify Contours

Simplify your inework to optimize your model. Specially useful for site modeling to make terrains simpler.
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
Site modeling can become an issue because the model can become very heavy, specially if we model complex topography. The best way to create a 3D model from your topographic lines is to use the SandBox tools. Simply follow this process.

• If you have a cad file with the topo lines at the right height each, simply import it to SketchUp (File --> Import --> Select DWG as the file format)
• Then select the topo lines in SketchUp and click on the "from Contours" button in the Sandbox Tool Bar.

This will create a terrain, but depending on how detailed your topo lines where, this might create a very heavy (in terms of memory) terrain. If you don't need 100% accuracy on how the terrain is modeled (and almost no one does) and want to optimize your model size, use the SimplifyContours.rb Plugin. This Plugin allows you to select the topo lines (Contours) and simplify them as much as you want/need. If your original topographic lines were splines in AutoCAD this is definitely a must, otherwise your model will become unbearably heavy.
This is a pretty old plugin, but still 4 years later it can save you from a struggle with a super heavy terrain model. Download it here if you please.


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SketchUp Plugins: Delete Coplanar Edges

Easily delete all those unnecessary coplanar edges with this Plugin. It will reduce de size of your model drastically.
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
I've been doing a lot of SketchUp modeling at work, that's the reason why you see here more posts about SU Plugins than usual. Anyways, I needed to clean part of my model that had a lot of unnecessary edges separating coplanar faces. And I though, there must be a Plugin for that. I wasn't wrong.

The deletecoplanaredges.rb Plugin, easily erase those unnecessary edges, turning a bunch of coplanar faces into a single one. See this quick example.

We want to remove all those lines that play no role anymore other than increasing the file size. Once you have the plugin installed, simply select all the geometry you want to clean up, right click on it and on the context menu select "Delete Coplanar Edges.

The result will be like the image below, a single face made of all the previous coplanar faces.

You can download the Plugin here.




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SketchUp Plugins: Delete Unnecessary Lines

Imported drawings can have a lot of unnecessary lines, there is a plugin to remove them all with a single click.
Català - Castellano
When we import CAD drawings to generate 3D geometry from them we might end up with hundreds of lines that we don't really need. Cleaning up the drawing of unnecessary lines is important to work more efficiently, but it can be tedious sometimes.
A Plugin that helps a lot on this task is the Stray_Lines.rb Plugin. With this plugin we can either Delete, Isolate (meaning hiding the rest of the model), Label or Select all the lines in a model that have an open end (and thus are not being used to generate a face). See the image below, where we have a bucnh of faces and lines that are not needed.


TO get rid of those lines, we could manually erase them. In this case it wouldn't take long, but imagine that instead of 10 lines like here we had 100 or 1000. So what we have to do is simply go to Plugins --> Stray Lines --> Delete. And it will delete any line with an open end.


See in the image that there are 4 options total. Each of them useful in a way or another. Try them out. You can download the Plugin here.

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SketchUp: Hide All the Edges.

There is an easy way to hide all the edges of an object in SketchUp.I was recently working on a complex SketchUp file, and for the sake of the presentation I needed to hide all the edges of some very complex objects. I wondered why there is no option like Hide --> All edges. So we would keep the faces visible but the edges hidden.
The trick is simple. Remember that SketchUp has many different modes to show faces and edges. One of these modes is the wireframe mode. This will be or work around this problem.
We will edit the component or group that we want to have with hidden edges and we turn on the wireframe mode on. Then we will see only the edges, so we select all the geometry and go to Edit --> Hide. That simple, after that all the edges will be hidden. Switch on any mode that shows the faces and you will find your geometry with hidden edges.
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AutoCAD: Excessive Xref Scales

How to get rid of the long and annoying list of Xref scales.
Català - Castellano
One thing we noticed at work after installing AutoCAD Architecture 2008 was the extremely long list of scales when a file had Xrefs. We would get some scales like "1:20_XREF_XREF_XREF_XREF_XREF_XREF".
The manual procedure to get rid of them is to use the command SCALELISTEDIT, and remove all the scales that we didn´t want to see or use. This can be a pretty tedious process if it needs to be done on lot of files.
A way around is to create a script containing this line (COMMAND "-SCALELISTEDIT""R""Y""E") and batch run it in all the files we need. We will need a program like ScriptPro that will allow us to batch run the script in as many files as we want.
Good news for those who are planning to update to AutoCAD 2009, the issue has been partially solved by adding an option on the scale list. We can select to "hide Xref Scales", so we don't have to deal or see the long list of scales that are mostly useless for the most of us.
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SketchUp 6.0: Purge files

Is there a command for SketchUp equivalent to AutoCADs purge?
Català - Castellano
When working long with SketchUp files, the program keeps in the file memory all the components the we´ve been creating during the process. This might end up on a Huge file that takes very long to open and is slower to handle although the model might be finally not that big.
SketchUp has a command similar to the "purge" command in AutoCAD, but kind of hidden.
The way to find it is to go to "Window - Model Info - Statistics - Purge Unused" This simple. This will purge all the unused components and reduce drastically the file size keeping only the needed information.

Window - Model Info - Statistics - Purge Unused
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AutoCAD: Overkill and Flatten commands

Two importnt commands to clean your drawing.
Castellano - Català
I just learnt today in a training session in my company two Express Tools commands that are very useful in some situations.

• OVERKILL: This command allows you to erase any duplicated line. Let's say that you have a line that is supposed to be a single one, but because you mirrored the drawing or whatever you did it happens to be a bunch of lines one on top of the other. Well select all the lines, type OVERKILL in the command bar, and they will end up being a single line with the length of the longest one. Of course it doesn't clean up anything if the lines are not exactly one over the other, but anyway this is very useful. I'll put you another example. In my company we use a laser cutter to build models. It is very very important that the files you send to the laser have no repeated lines, since that would make the laser cut more than once the same area, with the overheating risk that might end up with a nasty situation such as fire and sprinklers flooding the office. So select everything, tyoe overkill and you will get rid of most of the repeated lines.
  

• FLATTEN: This is a very useful command to know if you have trouble with lines that for some reason are not on 0 height. Select everything that you wanna have for sure on 0 elevation, type FLATTEN and everything will come to O elevation. Be careful because wih big topography files this might take really long and even crash AutoCAD if your computer is not powerfull enough. Remember also, that blocks will be flattenend and renamed, so be carefull when using this command.
  

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