Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Voids Voids Voids

If you read through Autodesk documentation for Revit and the best practices document that they published some years ago you'll find casually mentioned recommendations to "avoid voids" because they will negatively impact performance. That turns into a conversation overhead later, "Never ever use voids in families!!" Hmmm...

Recommendations are wonderful, wonderful when they actually mean something meaningful. A warning like don't use more than six voids in a family. That's specific, I better not use more than six voids or something bad will happen to me, and my project. Then again I might just get wild and create families with seven voids just to make other people mad and drive project performance into the gutter?

I've read and heard similar warnings and recommendations for using formulas, "Avoid using too many formulas in your families". Is eight too many or seven hundred? I'm guessing seven hundred is worse but what about twenty five or forty five. Have we crossed into unsanctioned and untenable content now?

I'd love to see more practical recommendations that quantify things better. I seriously doubt a family with several voids is really going to harm a project, even if there are five hundred copies of the family in the project. I suppose we need to turn the Revit "masses" loose and test all kinds of situations to come up with more specific recommendations?

In the meantime I'm going to keep being careful to avoid voids all while wondering how many voids to avoid...

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