Model Cleaner
PremiumDeep-purge a project from one 7-tab dialog: in-place families, unplaced views, unused templates and filters, duplicate line/fill patterns, rogue links, orphan and near-duplicate materials, unused sheets and schedules — with a blast-radius preview before anything is deleted. · Explore the live interface below - every control works exactly as it does inside Revit®.
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Test it Live - exactly as if you are in Revit
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Get Started in Minutes
Four simple steps to bring Model Cleaner directly into your Revit® environment.
1
Create Account
Sign up for a free NexionTools account - no credit card required.
2
Download Installer
One installer, 52 professional Revit® tools. Under 15 MB.
3
Open Revit
Model Cleaner appears in your ribbon automatically - ready to use.
4
Activate License
Enter your Premium key to unlock full features.
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Why Model Cleaner exists
In-place families are the shortcut that costs you later. Someone needs a one-off shape, makes it in place, and moves on. A year on the model has dozens of them, each its own family definition, none of them scheduling properly, and finding them means scrolling the project browser or building a schedule that half works. They are also never the only thing. By that point the project has views nobody placed on a sheet, view templates nothing uses, four line styles that differ by a trailing space, a link pointing at a file that moved, and the same material three times because it arrived from three consultants. All of it is findable in Revit. None of it is findable in the same place.
How Model Cleaner works
Run Model Cleaner on a project document - it refuses to start from a sheet view - and it scans the whole model in the background before you touch anything.
A verdict banner says where you stand: clean, light cleanup, or heavy cleanup with the finding count. A KPI strip breaks out total issues, in-place instances, unplaced views and duplicates.
Seven tabs hold the findings: In-Place families, Unplaced Views, Templates and Filters, Duplicates across line styles, line patterns and fill patterns, Rogue Links, Materials, and Sheets and Schedules. Each has a search box and All, None and Invert selection.
Tick one element and Show Blast Radius runs a deletion inside a transaction that is always rolled back, then reports what would have cascaded, broken down by category. It is opt-in and one element at a time - nothing is probed until you ask for it.
Delete Selected asks for confirmation, then removes the batch in one transaction, so a whole tab-worth of deletions reverses with one Ctrl+Z. On the Materials tab the same button merges instead: references in compound layers and material parameters are rewritten onto the keeper, and only then is the duplicate deleted.
Before
Model cleanup is a set of separate hunts - one for in-place families, one for orphan views, one for the duplicate line styles - done in different dialogs and usually abandoned halfway.
After
One scan produces every finding in one place with a verdict on top, and you delete what you have decided to delete in batches you can reverse.
When to reach for it
- Purging in-place families from a model that has accumulated them, which is the usual reason people open it.
- Investigating a model that has become slow to open or synchronise.
- A cleanup pass before a model is handed to another team or archived.
- Consolidating materials, line styles and fill patterns that arrived from several sources under near-identical names.
What it does not do
- Deleting an in-place family deletes its geometry. If the drawings depend on it, you need a loadable family in its place first - the tool does not convert one into the other.
- The blast-radius preview is opt-in and works on one checked element at a time. It is not computed automatically for everything you tick, because each probe is a real transaction opened and rolled back.
- It cannot tell you what is safe to remove. An unplaced view may be a work in progress and an unused template may be next month's standard - the scan produces candidates, not verdicts.
- Duplicates are clustered on near-identical names, so two styles that mean the same thing under two different conventions will not be grouped together.
- Deleting a duplicate line style or pattern does not rewrite what was using it; Revit rebinds those elements to a default. Materials are the exception - a merge rewrites the references first, then deletes the source.
- On a workshared model, elements owned by another user are skipped. The result bar reports what was actually deleted, and the skipped ones are written to the log rather than listed on screen.
- It will not run on a family document, a read-only model, or from a sheet view.
Questions
- Why are in-place families bad for Revit performance?
- Each one is a separate family definition stored in the project rather than a reusable loaded family, so a hundred similar in-place elements means a hundred definitions. They also behave poorly in schedules and cannot be reused across projects. A few are fine; accumulation is the problem.
- Will deleting things break my views?
- It removes the elements, so anything relying on them changes. That is what the blast-radius preview is for - check an element before you commit and you see what the deletion would take with it, rather than discovering it afterwards.
- Can I undo a cleanup?
- Yes. A delete batch is a single transaction, so a whole tab-worth of deletions comes back with one Ctrl+Z. Material merges are one undo entry per cluster, so merging several duplicate sets in one click takes several presses to reverse.
- What does it do about duplicate materials?
- It clusters materials with near-identical names, keeps the shortest name as the survivor, then rewrites every compound-structure layer and every material parameter pointing at the duplicates before deleting them. Orphan materials - ones nothing references at all - are deleted outright from the same tab.
- Can it convert an in-place family into a loadable one?
- No. That is a modelling job with real decisions in it, and no tool should be making them for you.