Office Hours: Content Car Wash

Chris Shafer: Thank you everyone for joining our content carwash webinar. This is something where we had a lot of clients and especially for whatever reason this year in 2025, so many of you have asked for a webinar and some more information about how do you go through the content carwash process, so we thought this is great time to have this webinar and really walk everyone through the the basics here.

So really what we hope to achieve with this is kind of really demonstrate the simplicity and efficiency that that this process entails.

One of the things you know, we talk a little bit more about this at the end of the webinar, but where we presented the process we went through with Ratio a couple years ago, it didn't take a long time, relatively speaking.

It only took us about 400. 400, what a slip there. 40 hours to clean all of Ratio’s library and we're gonna go over those numbers at the end of this presentation.

So to kind of give you a point of perspective, how quick and efficient this process can be.

So ultimately, the reason why we're you would want to do this.

This ensures your content library aligns perfectly with your graphical Revit standards.

Thus that means your project deliverables are in alignment with those same standards.

So it's really what it comes down to. It is a quality issue that we're trying to address with this content cleanup process.

Additionally, by going through this process, the things that you're teaching Guardian as you clean things up is thus adopted by every future project.

And then as more content comes into those projects, Guardian immediately knows what to do with those those properties and will align them automatically with your standards.

And so this is sort of you have those immediate results of improving the quality of your content, but then you have that long term where you're on a day-to-day basis, improving the quality of your project deliverables.

This is something that really rings true with a lot of your technical leadership.

We probably all heard it.

I know I feel like I see this on a daily basis, that Revit can't produce good looking drawings.

Revit can produce as good looking drawings as anything before it.

The problem is we've never been able to control the graphical output.

Based because our Revit properties are a mess.

And every time we load a piece of content, it gets further and further out of line.

Guardian really stems that that issue by making those automatic alignments.

All right, so let's go ahead and start diving into the webinar.

So couple things to kind of go over some ground rules before we get started here.

The mics are live, so at any moment you can unmute yourself, but we ask that you raise your hand before doing so.

We do want to make this sort of more interactive. In addition, as many of you have already done.

You know, feel free to utilize the chat, so the Guardian team is here to answer any questions that you may have, so feel free utilizing the chat.

Also, I will ask for one more thing.

Use reactions. Me standing here. I just see a blank screen.

Or I guess I see my PowerPoint there, but having the having the reactions, the thumbs up, even a thumbs down is is kind of keeps me going.

So feel free to use those, all right.

With that being said, let's go ahead and dive right in.

All right, the content carwash. Now, this may be seem a little overwhelming at first, but we're going to kind of break this down.

So, couple things to note here before we get too into the weeds is throughout this presentation. We're really going to have two types of slides.

One is steps that are foundational, things that you kind of have to do to kind of build this process.

And these are represented by a little brick icon. As you can see them along the top.

So all the foundational, all the foundational steps as part of this process are listed along the top. The 2nd of this is the actual cleaning process.

This is where you're going to be using Guardian’s project properties to actually clean the content as you go along.

And this is just represented by an actual carwash icon.

So let's start talking about the individual steps.

Again, we're going to keep this high level at this moment in time, then we're going to dive into each step with more detail.

So first define your graphical standards.

So we're going to get into details of what I mean by define your graphical standards.

Here in the subsequent slides, but really this is just your basic your text styles, your line styles, your line patterns and so on and so forth.

Now one thing to keep in mind as we're going through this entire process and just something to keep in mind when you're using Guardian’s project properties, the model that you're working in is your source of truth.

So all of your properties need to be loaded into that given model for Guardian to map what's incoming to what's in your project.

So this step of defining your graphical standards is is really a vital to this.

Step 2 is clean your Revit template, so our recommendation is these graphical standards are put into your Revit template, the one that you share with all your projects.

So before you kind of get to publish republishing that that template to everyone, you're gonna go and clean it using Guardian’s project properties.

The next step is creating a family cleanup tool.

And this is just gonna be your own Revit template that you're gonna use to start this process of cleaning your content.

And we're gonna show how this will actually work as we progress.

Then once you have that established Step 4 here is the process of cleaning your families.

Just taking those families and dropping into that content cleanup that, that content cleanup tool, then we get into Step 5 is the create a content container.

Now I've heard a lot of people say yes, I have content containers.

I like using content containers.

I've heard people say I'm not a big fan of them.

I would recommend as part of your cleaning process and your long term of maintaining content.

Your content container is really the only way you can really effectively understand your standards at large and as part of this process, you're gonna learn about your standards.

And you're not gonna be able to see this on a family by family basis or sometimes even by, say, a a batch of families and moving on to step 6 is exporting your content.

You know you want to get this content out for your teams to use, publishing it to your content management solution such as content catalog, Avail or even just a folder somewhere on your system.

All right, let's go ahead and sort of dive into step #1.

Define your graphical standards.

So.

My recommendation is for you to create what I call your standards dashboards right within your project template.

So this does multiple things.

Here is first and foremost it gets all of your standards into your template.

So again, as I mentioned earlier, your project template is your source of truth.

For your content or for your standards and so as content comes in, you need to be able to have those in there to map.

Second of all, as you are introducing all this clean content, you're saying hey, everything's aligned to our standards.

People are gonna ask, what are our standards?

This is a great way of getting and communicating out your standards to every project team. It's right there within your Revit template.

The other thing is is I would recommend doing this as a legend.

The reason being is is by putting in a legend no one remembers or thinks about looking for content in a legend.

And so it really helps preventing these standards from being deleted and purge out your models.

So let's actually talk about the actual standards.

So the first ones, let's talk about the necessary ones.

Your line patterns, your line styles, your text styles, your dimension styles.

Now, many of you may have a good understanding of what these are.

Others may not, so focusing on like line patterns and line styles, I would recommend starting with national CAD standards.

Just go get a version of national CAD standards. And as I mentioned earlier, working with your technical leadership.

Is saying to your your technical leadership, hey, we've done all this work to make sure every last template, every last family meets these given standards.

The next here is object styles and more specifically, since object styles are actually kind of static in Revit, it's your subcategories that could vary. Now a lot of people really don't understand subcategories and how they work.

You may not even know you know enough about the subcategories to actually define a standard.

So something I came across many years ago was the Australia and New Zealand BIM standards.

That was a whole list of object styles that they required.

And I found that even though they were on the other side of the globe, that these what they published as standards really worked well for me to establish our our subcategory standards for our given firm.

Now, you unfortunately now the Australia and New Zealand Revit standards is kind of went to the wayside, but luckily reaching out to our friends at bimcontent.com. They actually have basically adopted these for their own internal guidelines in which they create all the content that they provide to all their customers.

So. So they've made that that document available. And so I would say this is a great starting point to start understanding a standard for subcategories.

You may use it, you may not.

But at least it gives you good understanding, sort of the necessary subcategories that is required for a a robust content system.

Alright, the next is we kind of get into the nice to haves.

Your fill patterns, filled regions. I would say most of your your architects really care a lot about your fill of patterns and filled regions definitely.

At first first pass I would go and make sure these are all set.

But if you have limited time, these are things you could put on you know that that second round. Also getting into materials, shared parameters and even your system families.

So now text styles, dimension styles technically are system families.

But you can even get into, say, wall styles or or viewports or view types.

You know, there's a lot of system families that you can utilize Guardian to to clean up and also want to come back to shared parameters.

There's a lot of ways in which Guardian is really effective at managing your shared parameters.

And many of you may be starting to think about how do I start utilizing Autodesk's shared parameter service.

And when you have content that's all over the place, it becomes difficult to understand what is the good the bad of your shared parameters.

So this provides you a great opportunity to.

This process to get your shared parameters in alignment.

And then lastly here sort of in the future, you know if your view templates, your view filters, your load classifications, this isn't really necessary for round one when it comes to Revit families themselves.

So these are more more family or excuse me, these are more sort of view based or or model based settings.

Now, if part of this process you want to clean up your detail items, this is this is something you may want to have in place.

So with that being said, you know a couple of things you may be thinking. Well, what if I, you know, as I go through this, what if I don't know what all the things coming in are? And we're going to kind of go through some of this. We're going to switch over to live in, in the model so we can see some of this.

Is sometimes just having a place order when you have no standards, right as you start figuring them out.

So when I initially did this years ago, if I saw something that I'm like, is this a standard?

Is it not a standard?

Do I want it to be?

I just put prefix it with a TBD and then once I got it all out in front of me and knew what we had, I would go back and figure out do I want this to be included or do I want to change this to an existing standard that we have?

So as you go through this process, you're gonna learn along the way of what your standards are.

You're not gonna learn it on that initial family. It's gonna take the whole the whole process.

And kind of seeing it globally, this kind of comes back to the idea of the content container where you can see all of that. And lastly, you want all this, you know, all these properties to send it to Guardian Sync where these properties are in the cloud. No, you can distribute them out to all your given projects.

All right, so I've kind of felt like I've really ambled on for quite a bit.

So actually I want to switch over here to Revit and kind of show you live how we've kind of set things up and starting that initial process.

So I'm gonna do all this live.

I know we're not supposed to do modeling things live 'cause it seems like it always goes wrong. So, but I'm gonna roll the dice here.

So I'm I'm gonna assume that this what you see here is is our project template and I go ahead and just create a new model straight from here.

So now that we have this, I'm gonna actually come back over here and show the the dashboards that we've created in here that lays out our line styles, our text styles, our dimension styles, even laying out our filled regions.

And also our annotation tags and symbols.

So a lot of these can be hosted in in the cloud with Guardian Sync.

Some others, as far as your tags or your symbols may not, but if you have this ahead of time, this becomes really helpful, and especially if you're getting into cleaning up your your details you know, simple things say revision tags. Those things tend to come in.

This gives you an opportunity to teach Guardian your you know your simple best or your simple standards when it comes to your tags.

All right, so now that we've we have our our standards defined as I mentioned as far as step two, we want to clean.

We want to clean our template.

So I'm actually coming over here to project properties.

And this is where you would want to kind of go through each of these tabs and start mapping.

An old standard to a new standard or a foreign standard to a new standard.

So for those who have not utilized Guardian here, I'm actually going to I'm going to undo this here. I want to say don't remember and I'm going to go and remap this.

And I can go ahead and map this to.

This actually was not a good example here. Actually wanted to do this one down. Here we're going to do this one.

Pretend that didn't happen.

So this time I'm going to map this to, say, our glass standard and hit OK.

As you can see, Guardian has already memorized these I went through ahead of time and out of sync of time, went through and pre mapped a lot of these.

So we can just go ahead and process this.

And so you'd go through tab by tab.

Here's where you find a lot of your your tags.

And here you'd find a lot of your annotation.

So your text styles and your dimension styles and whatnot, you can see here before demonstration purposes, we listed old our old standard, but because now our all of our new standards which we prefix with GDN here are in here we can start mapping these.

So the process as I demonstrated earlier is just a matter of going from clicking that old standard, that foreign standard and mapping it to your standard.

And I'm actually going to review this live or actually process this live.

Now I think this is a good opportunity as this scans and cleans this given model.

If there are any questions up to this point, we'll take a little quick little pause here.

Or if there's any questions in the chat.

Joseph Wage: Hey, Chris, it's Joe.

I've got one for you.

Chris Shafer: Oh, Joe Wages.

Uh oh. Got to be on my a game here.

Joseph Wages: Hey, OK.

So what happens if, like you've got like multiple like I keep saying, you're doing MEP families and you've got multiple like types for like power, multiple types for horsepower, multiple types for, you've got redundant types like how do you?

How can you do it where you default to whatever the system ones are?

Is there a way to do that?

Chris Shafer: There is.

I would say.

Once you've established sort of that mapping and you know what the default one is 'cause when you think about it is when you build your template, you're gonna know what that default one is, right?

So whomever is responsible for managing those types initially, who's build all of them, would know. And then as you kind of go through this process, is making sure that you're always mapping to to that system one.

I hope that answers your question.

I would say.

Joseph Wages: It does.

Chris Shafer: Yeah, if you know if, if, Parley has anything to add to that.

He can add it to the in the chat.

So as you can see, we have 241 changes here.

And doing this live.

We're going through this pretty quickly now.

Also note going through each of these lines would take a significant I want to say a significant amount of time.

A notable amount of time, I would say it took me about in preparation of this going one by one and and clicking the mapping of these 241 changes took me about 45 minutes.

So when you think about it, it's all in your you can do a lot of this in in a very short amount of time.

All right.

AJ.

I see that you have, you have raised your hand.

You have a question?

AJ Shieck: More of just a a comment in terms of if people are trying to do this cleanup aspect and how much scrubbing of the content can needs to happen that potentially doing it in smaller chunks and not going through and mapping absolutely everything as we've run into some issues of running our mappings through a pre-existing old project and it there's just so much it's trying to grab that it it it has sometimes would run into troubles of getting into the high numbers like what you're showing, but it all depends on the content itself, so.

Chris Shafer: Yeah, that's a really good point. And and we're going to, we're going to hit on a little bit of this in, in a in a bit. Thank you, AJ, where understanding like start small start small this and understand just the quantity of the content that you process at any given time.

As you're aware, is, you know, Guardian utilizes Revit and with more and more processing it, it takes, you know that's those are just resources that that are being consumed, that that Revit is processing.

So yeah, it's always good to start with small chunks and you start to when you get through this process, you start to learn what is the appropriate amount. And it really depends on several factors. Is is not just quantity of content, but the complexity of content and so say something like a a door family that may have multiple nested families in them.

That'll take longer than just say, say a simple annotation tag. So.

These are the things that you kind of learn as you as you go. Thank you, AJ.

So as we just demonstrated, Step 2 is cleaning your Revit template.

Now a couple things I would recommend here is is you want to make sure that you establish the proper or have your proper mapping configuration file assigned to this.

I would also recommend you have that as sort of your master that you use as part of the cleaning process, and it's not the same that you will assign to all your subsequent projects.

I would always once I went through that process I would just duplicate that mapping configuration, and that duplicate is what would be assigned to all the active projects. I just want to make sure that me or my team who is responsible for going through the cleaning process.

Had absolute control and knew everything that was happening within that mapping configuration.

Right. Moving on to step three is creating a family clean out tool.

Again, this is sort of a foundational step in all this.

And what we recommend is actually taking your project template and kind of stripping it down by removing all your your project specific views and sheets. And really the point of this is is not only a a starting point and a cleaning tool, but also gives you opportunity to review the sort of the graphical aspects of of your of your content.

So as you can see here and I'll demonstrate this live in the model is that we've established a a sheet that has your plan, your plan view, your RCP, your your elevation your section, your 3D and have all these views in your fine, medium and coarse detail level.

So you can get a good understanding of how this this piece of content will be represented in in all these different different views.

So let's go ahead and flip back over here to the model now that we've cleaned it and if we come up here to our sheets and we go to our 3D family, we can see the same thing that we saw here.

So we've we have these 13 views.

So.

For our plan elevation section RCP, we've got each of these set.

So now you can obviously hear with the the piece of casework that we're showing you're not gonna see it.

RCP

And that's sort of the goal, right?

Make sure it is things showing up appropriately, so this is a good way, especially when you're getting started to understand how things are showing up and coming back to your object styles, right?

Is is making sure that is is the subcategory that I have assigned. Is it is it showing up appropriately?

Is the overrides that may have with the view template that you know, is that showing up properly? So this gives you a good insight of how everything is performing within your given families, especially as you go through and do all the mappings.

All right, we've got.

We've talked about a lot of the foundational aspects of all this.

Let's go back over to the PowerPoint. Step 4, actually cleaning your content.

So now that you've had your content container established, you're going to simply just take your families and start dropping them in there.

Now I would recommend is starting with certain categories and within certain categories focusing on a few base families.

So what I mean by that.

Is here.

We've got a piece of casework. Is basically if, if if you've ever gone through the process of creating large quantities of content, you basically focus on, you focus on creating a handful of base families that hopefully address all the subsequent families.

So whatever those are, I would say start there.

And you just simply drop them into your model and I'm actually going to do this live here in a minute.

Is because once you drop those in, you're gonna have Guardian’s dialog, which we're gonna demonstrate, just start mapping these.

Probably about 90% of the mappings that you need to perform will be found within that, just that first set of base content, and so this speeds up the process for all the subsequent pieces of content.

The other thing I wanna talk about when it comes to your base content.

Is say doors.

So a lot of lot of firms build their doors where you have nested shared families.

And so my recommendation is make sure that, especially if you're using shared families, is those those nested shared families are preloaded.

That's the first thing that you would do.

You would load them into your into the model and then do all the mappings as needed.

Then when you start loading the actual host family.

Or, you know, in this case, the doors. Guard or, excuse me, Revit will provide you the prompt.

Do you want to overwrite or do you want to use the ones in the project? In that case you would just simply select the one that's in the project and just do that because you know those are the ones that are your source of truth.

And then as AJ had mentioned earlier is understanding what is the appropriate amount of families to do at a given time.

So so my recommendation is to do somewhere between 50 to 100 families at a time.

And you may be thinking, well, I've got 4,000 families that's gonna take forever.

It actually goes much quicker than you think, right?

Once you start going it, it'll you start picking up speed because you're doing these mappings as you go along. And as I mentioned earlier, is about 90% of the mappings are gonna be performed, probably within the first handful of families, and so at that point, your time is not really doing much other than Guardian and Revit processing those incoming pieces of content.

So.

Another thing to keep in mind, as I mentioned earlier is you may not understand all the given properties that are coming in at that given time.

Don't worry about it.

Don't sweat it if you don't understand what it is, what it's doing.

Simply rename it in you know, in Guardian to, you know, put TBD. So then once you're done with all this and all this content is in your model or in your content container, that's when you can go back and start to investigate a little bit more.

Don't get too hung up as part of the process.

Investigating every little standard.

Just wait till the end.

Just punt on them.

It's better to see them collectively at the end.

All right. So with that being said, let's go back over here to to Revit.

And So what I'm gonna do is come over here to my floor plan view and let's get my folder open here. And I'm just gonna take a door.

And I'm gonna drop it in.

Now that I've placed the door, I'm just going to escape and Revit is, excuse me Guardian is going to go ahead and start processing this family.

So I purposely utilize the door here. As I mentioned earlier, that doors are typically heavier, reason being or the reason I wanted to show this is you can see it actually goes pretty quick on a single door.

And as you do more and more doors, you know you're going to be processing a lot more ahead of time.

So now when you have your incoming content as you can see this, the way this happens is a little differently then when you're processing your your project template. Before you went to Project Properties and went through your mappings. In this case you're presented with this dialog.

So a couple of things that we can note here is.

Is that here, we have this nested family, so one of the things that I like to do here is when I rename these.

Is when I did nested families. I like to rename them with nested upfront.

So all the nested shared nested families kind of group themselves within the project browser.

Another thing you have to note when you are doing families.

You know, it's just not about, you know, mapping or renaming the family, but you also have to map or rename the family type.

So this is a good example when it comes to the nested shared. Had I preloaded the door panel itself, I could have mapped this to the door panel that's in the project, so I'm just going to go through and kind of rename this to F and flush panel.

And that's really all you really need to do is kind of go through this process and start going through and seeing where things are used, how it's being used, whether these are duplicates. We can see here that that these two are exactly the same.

So now what I can do is I can go ahead and select this and map it to that.

Now.

The beauty of this and beauty of the, you know, Guardian and the mapping configurations is as soon as we teach Guardian what this is, whenever it sees it in the future, it's automatically going to do do it for you.

So coming down here, let's get into like the diagonals now, because excuse me, the arrowheads because the diagonal 64th is not being used in this model or in this in this family.

You really think about it? Like how often do you really need an Arrowhead in a door family?

Is Guardian is like we're just gonna purge it out automatically for you.

So any property that is not used Guardian by default will set that to be purged out.

Let's come down here to our shared parameters.

You can see here we've got the not the correct shared parameter frame type.

So how many times have you been on a project where you go to your door schedule and your frame type and your panel type is is not being scheduled because the family coming in has the incorrect shared parameter? And so here we can simply just go ahead and select this and if I type in scheduled frame type.

We can go ahead and map that and go through here and select schedule panel type.

Map it.

And simple things here like here is a good example.

Here's our olds. We get to our materials. Our old standard clearance zone. We want that to be our new one.

And I'm going to put it to be our Guardian default.

And that's all you really do is kind of go down this process and start mapping this.

Even here we do not use glass maybe.

Well, this might not be used at this moment in time.

This might be an opportunity for me to go ahead and teach Guardian whenever you see. Do not use this glass.

I want it to be the specific glass that we use throughout our projects.

So I'd type in glass.

And maybe I just want the clear glass. And so in the future, every time Guardian sees, do not use this glass, it'll update it to the Guardian clear glass.

So that’s just the matter.

Again, continuing here, just teaching, teaching Guardian the correct mappings.

And you just continue going on and on and on.

Now another thing I'd like to highlight here is sometimes in a given family, you may find, and especially when you're starting off early on here, you'll find that you have a lot of a lot of content or properties in here that are may not meet your naming conventions or are misspelled.

This often provides a good opportunity to go through and just go ahead and rename these. If you need to.

So if I go ahead and select this and rename it, I know the underscore material is not our standard. Gives me the opportunity to go ahead and teach Guardian.

This is a great opportunity and all this is really the goal is to be teaching Guardian as much as you can.

And so we can just continue down here.

We can find their object styles so we can see here.

Clearence Zone is not being used, but Clearence is.

But neither one of those are standards.

Our standard is clearance zone.

This is something you'll find over and over as you go through your content is people have made up all kinds of different ways to really mean the same thing.

The goal here is to get it to a singular, consistent way of doing it.

And we can just continue down going through our clearances.

And lastly here we can come in here. And again, let's teach this an opportunity to teach Guardian what is the the right standards or the correct standards?

Now that I've had all my mappings, one of the things I want to highlight down here is your export button.

What you can do by selecting this Guardian will save this back to its source.

And so this is a great way as you go wherever you're pulling these families from, you're you're putting in the right back into that location clean.

I'm going to deselect this because I don't want to save it as we go.

I'm going to go ahead and process.

And as you'll see here.

It will not take a long time to go through this, even with all the the shared parameters that we have cleaning up.

I think this is a good opportunity to to pause for a brief moment to see if there's any questions about this given process.

Parley Burnett: Chris, I'll just chime in really quick because there's a question.

In fact, this is a good example in this in this progress bar you could see Guardian going into the nested families within some of those families.

And it's doing the work needed to swap parameters and anything else that Chris mapped and it reloads everything on up even into the project.

So no need to like kind of break everything apart, have Guardian clean everything and do that reassembly yourself. It does it for you.

Chris Shafer: That's a really important fact here is is Guardian has cleaned every nook and cranny of every nested family in there. Coming back to the shared parameters, as you're aware, when it comes to nested families, you may have the parameters and the shared parameters linked, and there might be included in formulas. Guardian will actually go through and update those shared parameters wherever they may exist, even in in if they're linked, or even if they're in formulas.

It will also retain all those values that are assigned to those parameters.

So it really does keep everything intact. I think I saw a hand raised as we just now.

Jerry Boswell, Jerry: Yeah, this is Jerry.

I have a question on the previous dialog box for the mapping.

Chris Shafer: Yeah.

Go ahead.

Jerry Boswell

Is there a way to export that data so that a team can analyze it?

Because a lot of times there's families where you just don't know enough to go through and do the mapping at the time when you're looking at it.

It needs to be thought out and then addressed later.

Chris Shafer: Yeah, that's a really good point.

And I'm gonna let let Parley answer about sort of sort of the data aspect of this. What I would like to highlight here is this is where I really talk about punting. If you don't understand the standard or or the property at that moment in time this is.

Where I may, and let's just say I'm just gonna rename one of these, right?

This is to kind of demonstrate this is what you would have done in that previous dialog on the import I just put like TBD as a prefix.

And then after the fact, after you know, we get everything in there, then I can come up here to search and put TBD.

And then I would be able to see see everything I must have did something.

Just to map that or change the name incorrectly, right?

Oh, I haven't mapped it yet.

That's the reason why.

But this would give you an opportunity to kind of see all those things that you you don't know quite what it is, but then kind of go through and you can do your scan for usage.

Here, find out where it is.

And and whatnot.

Jerry Boswell: Well, my my point here is that we need to go back and review those TBDs.

And if they're stuck in a dialog box, it's harder for a team to review them offline.

Is there a way that team could review it through like an Excel spreadsheet or some external manner?

Chris Shafer: Definitely Parley.

Parley Burnett: I'll chime in there, Chris.

Yeah, yeah.

Thanks Jerry.

Good question.

I'm actually glad you asked that, because we do have a little known ability we added to this not too long ago.

There's a little export button down there above that scan selection for usage.

Yeah, mouse over that there, Chris.

So what happens is when you scan properties for usages.

Of course it populates the interface with these ones and however many times a a property is used.

And the duplicates.

But really, everything's interrelated, right?

A pattern can be used by material, but that material can also be used by a wall type and so when you click that export button, it's actually gonna give you an XML file which has those dependencies kind of built into it.

So you could basically like you're asking, Jerry, send that to a team and they could review this.

Jerry Boswell: OK.

Great. Thank you.

Chris Shafer: Awesome.

Thank you, Parley.

Parley Burnett: There's there's another question from from Dave here.

Just wanted to confirm that when you export or or fix and clean a family and you say save families out, right Chris, this basically is going to drop those families into a zip file for you to kind of put back where they belong.

The problem with Revit is a lot of times the families don't have their saved path really accurately placed in them and so we kind of leaving that up to you.

But Guardian is smart enough to know what families indeed had some actual change made to them.

Chris Shafer: And I saw that.

I don't know if it was the same, Dave just raised their hand.

Or if there's a follow up question.

Dave Peterson: Yeah, basically just a follow up on it.

I I thought I heard you say when you picked on that export button that it makes those changes back to the original family that you had loaded in.

So you don't need to export them back out again.

That's where my I was getting a little confused on.

Parley Burnett: I see.

It does make the changes within the within the project file we have opened, but not to the directory of files where they might have been loaded from.

Dave Peterson: Got it.

Got it. Thanks.

Chris Shafer: Thanks for clarifying, Parley.

I'm going to go ahead and close this without saving and I'm going to come back over to PowerPoint.

So Step 5 is creating a content container.

I would recommend having a single Revit project in which all of your families go into and that this becomes your source of truth moving forward.

I want to say I have a couple former teammates here who who have utilized this methodology under under my direction for many years.

Is is what we found that with thousands and thousands of families, a couple 1000 details all within drafting views.

We found that this file was very stable.

We hosted this on ACC, so everyone had access to it from wherever.

Even though the file size was about 750 mb, which sounds large, what we found is that because it wasn't an active day-to-day project, there wasn't changings happening on a regular basis.

It actually performed really well and never mind that we kept, you know, absolutely this model absolutely clean all the time.

So using Guardian to make sure that there wasn't anything foreign in here, it was just what was necessary was was in here.

So the model performed really well.

A couple of the things that sort of a sort of a housekeeping sort of perspective on this is because we hosted on ACC, we made sure that we are we had set regular publishing schedules on this. So we always had backups of this.

My recommendation, actually, before we got to ACC, we actually hosted this on on OneDrive or SharePoint kind of one the same.

Because OneDrive will make a backup of all this every time the files change, there's a backup. I want to say. Never once did we actually have to go to this backups, but just for a peace of mind, you know, making sure that you you're thinking long term just in case something happens.

Really, the the ultimate goal of having a content container is is one so you can see everything kind of laid out.

One of the things that we would always do say the case work here is making sure that our subcategories are aligned each view. Say this take this 3D view for case work, we had a custom view template in which every subcategory we assigned a caller. So we were able to just visually quickly identify if if a subcategory was misaligned.

In addition, by getting it all in one place, we were able to start to look at those tbd's right and start to understand is and say casework.

You know someone who called the the cabinet itself, the subcategory, say in half the families, they would say it's called Cabinet and the other half they would call it carcass.

And so you get to the end.

You're like, all right, which one are we going to choose?

Or maybe when you're cleaning up your details, it might be a text style or dimension style and you start seeing these side by side, it gives you an opportunity to kind of see it holistically.

Yeah, but because the power of Guardian here is, you just say all right, now you know all the carcasses, I want to be cabinet. You click the button and Guardian will process it. Done.

And then whenever Guardian sees this in the future, whether it's your container or every subsequent project in your entire firm, it will automatically be updated to cabinet.

So you know when you just think about when someone is doing their interior elevations.

But they set their view templates and set set their subcategory for cabinet to a certain way.

They know that that their view will respond exactly how you anticipate it. The the graphical representation of that casework would be exactly how you intended.

So the other thing is, is this is a great place for your detail, your detail items and your your drafting views.

So if you're managing very large sets of of just standard details and you're utilizing detail items as you're aware, if you insert a view from another project that has detail items on it, Revit's going to want to put the ones, twos and threes behind it, right? So Guardian gives you an opportunity to map all those clean all those up just so you have a single say, a single break line.

And I would even add one thing here is when it comes to the break lines, Guardian's smart enough to know say this incoming family has has the extent of the break line using instance parameters to be this.

Many of you may have gone through this process where once you've inserted that you swap the family out, just mainly within Revit or maybe another tool is that it will resort back to some other extents. With Guardian we actually we actually keep those values, we memorize those values and replace them.

So when you do a holistic swap of an instance with a detail item with an instance value on it, Guardian will remember those values and place it after swapping.

So this becomes really a great place of really maintaining all of your content, maintaining your standards and again this becomes your source of truth.

So I see a hand is raised.

Josh Kennedy: Hey, Chris, I just wanted to bring up a question that was in the chat from Anne asking is a container model for each discipline recommended?

Chris Shafer: I would say yes, but I would say start with one.

At at some point.

Well, it depends on how much content you're talking about.

Um.

I can make the argument for both directions here. I would say keeping it all on one because simple things like your shared parameters and keeping that online just so that this is a. If you're using a width right, you're using that same width across all of your content regardless of discipline.

However, the reason I would argue that actually separate out into separate ones is is basically because sometimes you may have different teams working on that.

And they are operating maybe on slightly different standards.

And just strictly from my own experience working in a multidisciplinary firm, we were never able to get the say, architecture and the MEP and the structural standards perfectly in alignment across.

And so, sometimes you'd need a little division.

And so I saw that Joe Wages raised his hand on this.

And I know Joe may have a a comment or two on this front.

Joseph Wages: Yes, former battles, but the the question I had was this. If I have say like I've got a standard template, everything's good, all my share parameters are good. I stripped out all my content.

I've made my single sole source of truth. I'm now pumping in families.

I'm. Are you saying to do it in groups of 50?

Map everything and then do the next batch. Or like how am I doing that?

Chris Shafer: Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So again, start with your sort of this base families.

Just do a handful of those, do your mappings then depending on again the size of the family. If it's something like under a meg or something, you might be able to get to 100 at a time. You know, drop it in your mappings, then once that's done, go grab another hundred drop and then you'll you'll find you'll find the sort of the the right amount. Another thing is.

Joseph Wages: I.

Chris Shafer: Go ahead, Joe.

Joseph Wages: Oh, get to get the the follow up was sorry about that.

If I say I'm using like a Python script and I'm harvesting like say I've got like a batch of like Rogue templates from everywhere and I'm harvesting everything.

Just carte blanche, right?

I'm Python scripting and I'm dumping into location.

Is that is that a good approach to do that to capture all that stuff?

Do you think that would be the best way to get everything that way?

That way I've covered all bases?

Chris Shafer: The only thing when using a Python script and it's kind of scripting this kind of bringing everything in is and and Parley you may have a better, maybe a better perspective on this than I do is.

Is this, I guess the order of sequence and or order of operations in which this is happening.

Is you want to kind of get it in all a single location, but then how all that handles does it?

You know, does it pull from one location and dump it in, then immediately go to the next?

And how does Guardian react with that versus kind of figure it all out, then bring it all in at once?

It might be one of those things where you may not process the content as it comes in, but wait until it's all in and then process it holistically through the project properties dialog.

Guardian or excuse me, Parley, you have anything to add on that?

Parley Burnett: No, I think that covers it. Thanks.

Chris Shafer: Yep, cool.

Joseph Wages: Thank you, Chris. I appreciate you, buddy.

Chris Shafer: Thank you.

Thanks Joe.

And you know, step six, there is exporting your content.

So this is.

I'm gonna say probably the easiest step of the whole process where they go just exporting it to your content management solution or even a folder, and there's a lot of ways.

There's a lot of tools out there for sort of mass exporting.

You can do this as you're bringing things in.

I do recommend waiting until the end to do this.

For for two reasons.

One is getting back to those tbd's right. Now you know, everything has been cleaned up after the fact and everything's in alignment.

And two, is many of you may know the secret.

Is is when you save a family directly out of Revit versus saving it from the family editor, it reduces its file size.

So it's something a little upside to that and also once you're done, send all these graphical standards up to to the Guardian cloud using Guardian Sync.

Before we close out here, I just kind of want to go over.

The the the process we went with Ratio almost two years ago. So we're gonna drop a link to that case study and that webinar then so you can see this.

We spent about 40 hours cleaning up Ratio’s library and when I say we we say a lot of it was the Guardian team having to learn Ratio's standards as part of this process.

So we cleaned up just shy of 4,000 or I would just say 3,741 of their of their approved libraries or approved families.

But then there was another 4,470 of non approved families. So we had a lot of furniture families from tons of manufacturers, a bunch of random stuff we said let's just dump it in.

Let's just dump it in to to the family cleanup tool, just so we can teach Guardian.

So when I said furniture families, you know, we had all the the Hayworth.

And on and on.

We've all been there.

We've all seen it.

This gave us an opportunity to kind of learn those manufacturers standards.

And how to teach Fuardian to convert those into Ratio standards.

As you can see, all those families there was almost there was over 600 individual detail items with over 744 types because when you're mapping detail items, you also want to map the the family types.

So and we also just, I have 300 drafting views that we cleaned up and so we touched and we were able to see this in the data. I'm gonna show you the dashboard here in a second is we're able to touch and clean up almost 57,000 items individual elements.

All within about 40 hours.

And so when we look at the total properties mapped, right?

So what we what we did while there a lot of properties are mapped as you can see that number on the left, just say your object styles and subcategories and we mapped over 1000 of them. But then we removed so much more, right?

So when you think about the items that were removed, whether it's your CAD imports or your materials, that's just making those families lighter, it's making your projects lighter. It's also removing those foreign standards from your projects.

Right. So that means your overall quality of your documentation is improved.

And one of the things that we did as part of this process is we made sure that we were using Guardian Backstage to capture all that data.

I think this is a really important step in all this is making sure that that you're capturing and understanding how much Guardian is working here for you, because at some point, 40 hours in the scheme of things, is not a lot, but I imagine for a lot of you going to your leadership and say, hey, can I get 40 hours to go clean our library?

They're gonna be like, why?

What's the value of that?

So having Guardian and and especially Guardian Backstage to provide you this data to show, hey, this is how much we've cleaned. This is how much we taught Guardian. And then every subsequent project that we that we do in this firm moving forward will take advantage of these automations.

So ultimately, you know this whole process is about improving your your graphical quality throughout your all of your projects, right?

So this is really about your your project deliverables and what you do as a firm.

It really starts with your basic families and making sure they're absolutely in alignment.

So I want to thank everyone for their time today and I know we're right on 5:00 and I want to just make sure we answer any last questions people may have.

Josh Kennedy: I think from the chat, Chris, we are covered.

Chris Shafer: All right, awesome.

I appreciate everyone's everyone's time today. I will say personally having done 10s of thousands of families with this process, it is one of the most satisfying things you'll ever do, knowing that one you just feel like you know you're cleaning everything and just the peace of mind knowing that your library is perfect when you deliver it to your teams so.

That being said, I just want to thank everyone for their time today.