12 Amazing Review Plugins All BIM Managers Should Use
A big part of the BIM manager job is to set up systems to automate boring and repetitive tasks. There are countless Revit plugins out there. In this post, we bring you the most useful ones. Here is the complete list, in no particular order.
1. Family Reviser by Diroots
COST: Free
Family Reviser can be used to find & replace text in a project. A valuable use of this tool is to modify the prefix of families and types. In the example below, we find all “RP” text and replace them with “BRB” instead. This process can be done for both loadable and system families. Check out our previous review of this tool.
2. BIM Tools by Softistik
COST: Free
This plugin contains multiple tools, but the most helpful one is called Change Font. I’ve once spent 30 hours manually changing the font of 100+ families. Needless to say, this tool can save you a great deal of time.
This feature changes the font of system families and modifies the fonts inside loadable families like tags, symbols, and title blocks. In the example below, we switch the Swis721 Cn BT to Comic Sans MS.
3. Colorspasher by BIM One
COST: Free
Filters can be quite cumbersome to set up. A great and free plugin you should use to create visual representation is Colorsplasher by BIM One. It allows you to automate a color scheme based on the value of elements. In the example below, you can see each “year” parameter is represented by a different color.
4. Paramanager by DiRoots
COST: Free
In Revit, there is no way to quickly add multiple shared parameters to a project or to a family. You have to add them manually, one by one. The free DiRoots plugin called ParaManager allows you to automate boring parameters tasks.
In this example, we load the shared parameters text file in the plugin. Then, we select the 8 parameters simultaneously and assign them to the correct category.
Once the parameters are imported, you’ll get the chance to set the type of parameter and categories to be assigned. Many hours of boring work saved. Thanks, DiRoots!
5. PyRevit by Ehsan Iran-Nejad
COST: Free
This plugin rocks! It was fully developed and shared for free by Ehsan Iran-Nejad. It is a swiss army knife. All BIM managers should download it right now. Click here to read our previous review of this plugin.
One of its use is the Keynote Manager. Keynotes are a pain to manage. With this, you can modify keynotes without having to open a .txt file.
6. Model Checker by AutoDesk
COST: Free
While the user interface of this plugin is quite quirky and complicated, it is a useful tool to verify the health of your model. After running the plugin, you will get a “good practices” report. You can get the full list of families, the number of groups, imported CAD files and much more. In the example below, the plugin is useful to help us identify the bloated elevator family.
7. Guardian by Iconic BIM
COST: Starting at $89/year/user
No matter how often you repeat to your users that they shouldn’t explode a CAD file inside a model or bring in garbage families to your project, it keeps happening. Iconic BIM decided to confront the problem with a great plugin called Guardian. You can program custom warnings below when one of your users tries to do something nasty, like exploding a CAD file. You can set a custom text and ask for a password to proceed..
This is barely scratching the surface of what this plugin can do. It also contains protected pins, mapping elements and much more.
8. Isolate Warning by Archisoft
COST: Free
This plugin allows you to visualize warnings in your Revit model. It creates two 3D views: One called IsolateWarningElements and another called OverrideWarningElement. You can see that all the elements afflicted by a warning appear with a green graphic override:
9. Ideate Explored by Ideate
COST: $675/year
This plugin does many things, but a highlight is the Warnings Manager. It allows you to search, filter and sort warnings by priority level. The most helpful feature is probably the color code for warning priority. A high-priority warning will be in red, medium priority in yellow and low priority in green. To improve the performance of your model, make sure to solve high-priority warnings first.
10. Prosheets by Diroots
COST: Free
The third great free plugin by DiRoots on this list is used to bulk export your Revit file to multiple formats.
An annoyance when exporting each sheet to CAD or other format is that the naming options are limited. With ProSheets, you can use an editor to add any parameters to the files’ names. In the example below, we set the project number, sheet number, date (which is automatically generated), and custom separators between the fields.
You can also use the plugin to export to multiple formats at once, like DWG + PDF.
11. RTV Xporter Pro by RVT Tools
COST: Starting at $49/year/user
This plugin is similar to ProSheets, but you can schedule a time to export documents. For example, you could decide to export to NVW, DWG and PDF every Thursday at midnight. The tool works even if Revit isn’t open. It avoids the annoyance of spending an hour preparing printnig and exporting each week. The user interface could be better.
12. Dynamo by Autodesk
COST: Free
I’ve you’ve never heard of Dynamo, you are probably doing BIM in a cave. This is a visual programmation plugin with infinite possibilities. It is an essential part of each and every BIM manager. Even if you don’t program the script yourself, you should at least know how to run them.
If you are a Dynamo newbie, our new MANAGE learning package contains a huge chapter about Dynamo. You will learn to get familiar with the user interface, you will create your first script, you will create a link with Excel and much more.
Click here to watch the Dynamo tutorial from our new course.
Did you enjoy this post? You will love the new MANAGE learning package for Revit.
This article was originally published on RevitPure’s blog and has been republished here with permission.
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