The 4,200 families we keep, and the 18,000 we threw out
How we approached curating a Revit family library worth shipping. Spoiler: ruthless deletion and metadata above all.
The first audit of our combined family catalogue found 22,000+ files across studios. The kept set sits at 4,200. Curation took six months and was the least glamorous work of the year.
The criteria
- Parametric coverage — does it handle the variant range we actually need?
- Naming consistency — does it match our type catalogue conventions?
- Performance — does it bloat the model with hidden geometry?
- Documentation — does the family ship with a usage note?
- Provenance — do we have rights to redistribute?
The performance check eliminated 60% of candidates. A family with 11 nested arrays and 30+ parameters is rarely worth keeping when a slimmer alternative exists.
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