Thursday, December 06, 2012

Upgrading and Reloading Families

I overhead a conversation the other day at Autodesk University. One person suggested to the other that we should always upgrade families to the latest release and then reload them all into our project after it has been upgraded. They theorized that Revit was having to "upgrade" them each time we open a project, like the message we see when a linked file is still based on an earlier version. Assuming that is true they went on to say that upgrading the families and reloading them would avoid this repeated upgrading of content when you open a project.

My gut feeling is that is not true after the project is initially upgraded. I believe that the process of upgrading a project is taking into account the content that is part of the project as well. If I'm correct then the content inside the project is effectively upgraded as well. Saving a family out of the project results in a new family based on that version of Revit too, not the previous one.

Only a developer or product designer/manager could say for certain though.

2 comments:

Viking said...

You both are correct.

Anonymous said...

I'm late to the show here, but here is something additional to consider:
If the families are catalog based and not upgraded in the library, then even if they exist in the latest project template/version they will upgrade in the background each time a new type is loaded.