Realized after 6 months I was loading my BIM models all wrong

I was working on a hospital project in Denver and kept wondering why my Revit models were crashing every time I tried to run clash detection. Turned out I was importing the entire mechanical model as a single linked file instead of splitting it by floor. My BIM manager pointed it out after I complained about lag for the 15th time. Has anyone else had that moment where you find out you've been doing something basic wrong for months?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylor.hayden10d ago

Honestly, is it really that big a deal though? Revit crashes for a million reasons, not just linked files. Splitting by floor might help a little, but it isnt some magic fix. Half the time the lag is just Revit being Revit, not your workflow.

hugo_robinson259d ago

@gthe_jessica brings up a good point about model quality. A buddy of mine tried splitting his linked files by floor and it really did help his big hospital project, but his coworker did the same thing on a smaller office building and saw zero change in performance. It really does seem to depend on how the main model was put together in the first place.

the_jessica10d ago

Taylor, I'm right there with you on the "Revit being Revit" part. I swear I've had files that just freeze up for no reason at all while I'm just zooming around, not even doing anything heavy. And yeah, splitting linked floors helped one job a tiny bit, but another time it did basically nothing because the lag was just from how the model was built in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if we're just pushing too much into one file and expecting it to work like magic.