Family Finder
PremiumAudit loaded families by type/instance count to find bloated families. · 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 Family Finder 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
Family Finder appears in your ribbon automatically - ready to use.
4
Activate License
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Why Family Finder exists
One family is quietly costing you more than the rest of the model put together. It was downloaded from a manufacturer, it has every screw modelled, and it is placed four hundred times. Revit will not tell you which family that is. You find it by suspicion, or by deleting things until the model speeds up.
How Family Finder works
Scan, and every loaded family that actually has instances placed is measured - face count from a sample instance, instance count, and how far its geometry exceeds a sensible benchmark for its category. A family sitting in the project unplaced is not ranked, because it is not costing you anything yet.
Families are ranked by total impact, so the one costing you the most is at the top rather than buried alphabetically.
Severity is assigned - critical, high, watch or OK - and a KPI strip shows the total geometry load across the model.
Select a family to see the analysis and act on it from the same panel: select its instances, zoom to them, isolate them in the view, or delete them. Each of those is a normal Revit change and reverses with Ctrl+Z.
Other tabs in the same tool handle the related housekeeping: batch-renaming families and types with a conflict preview, and clearing out Revit's automatic backup files - both the .rfa and the .rft backups, with options to keep the most recent few and to include subfolders.
Before
Family bloat is a suspicion. Nobody can name the family that is actually responsible.
After
Families are ranked by the load they put on the model, so the conversation starts with the worst one.
When to reach for it
- Investigating a model that is slow to navigate or regenerate.
- Vetting a manufacturer library before it is adopted as standard.
- A cleanup pass before a model is issued or archived.
What it does not do
- Face count and instance count are a good proxy for cost, not a direct measurement of frame time.
- Only families with instances placed in the model are measured. An unused family sitting in the project does not appear in the ranking.
- It identifies, ranks, and can select, isolate or delete instances. Simplifying a heavy family is still work in the family editor.
- Backup-file deletion writes to disk and is not undoable through Revit - that one is deliberate and separate.
- A high-impact family may be entirely justified. The ranking tells you where to look, not what to remove.
Questions
- How do I find which Revit family is slowing down my model?
- Revit gives you no per-family cost figure. This measures face count and multiplies by instance count to rank families by the load they actually place on the model, which is usually a much shorter list than people expect.
- Can it rename families in bulk?
- Yes, with find and replace, prefix, suffix and case handling, and a preview showing how many renames are actionable and how many would conflict before anything is committed.
- Does deleting family backups affect my project?
- No - those are the numbered .rfa and .rft backups Revit leaves next to family and template files on disk. You can keep the most recent few and sweep subfolders as well. Deleting them is a file operation and cannot be undone in Revit, which is why it is a deliberate, separate action.