Troubleshooting Revit Issues - Part 3

This is part 2 of a 3 part series addressing ways to troubleshoot issues in your Revit project.

The Autodesk Help site has some great information. Here, I have taken the liberty of adding my experiences to their outline. 

Here are some tips when troubleshooting mysterious issues with Revit.

Note: When troubleshooting Revit, you might make changes that you will not want to keep. To avoid making unwanted changes to your project file, make a copy of the project (and if necessary linked project files) and only work with the copied file.

Views and View Templates

If you find that one view, is not behaving like your other views in your project create a view template from the view that is working and apply that template to the problematic view. If the issue is cleared rebuild the view based upon the working view template, If you’re still having issues with the new View Template try deleting the view and re-creating it.

Also check your “Hardware Acceleration” setting under Revit Options, try un-checking the Hardware Acceleration option to see if this makes a difference.

Families and Components

If you have particular elements that you suspect are causing the issue, delete them, and test if the issue continues. Sometimes a family or a component may be causing an error, an error may be related to a specific instance of a family, not the family itself. If this is the case either re-build the family instance type or start eliminating unnecessary family types.

Try cutting to the clipboard and then pasting it back into the same place. If this does not work (or is not possible), remove the items and recreate it.

After selecting the elements, and before deleting them, filter your selection by category, removing groups of categories. This will allow you to find the category of the problematic elements.  

Once you know the category, use the project browser to find all of the families associated with that category, expand the family, right click and Select All Instances, and select In Entire Project. Remove groups of families within the category to find the specific family related to the issue. 

Crashing in a particular view or a particular command

If you find you’re crashing when accessing a particular view or selecting particular commands, you can quickly check if the issue is related to elements within the project (by deleting "all" elements), and then narrow down and isolate the problematic elements.

Delete all elements from the project by going through the following steps:

1. Go to a default 3D view
2. Draw a crossing selection box (from bottom right to top left) over all the visible elements, and delete them all
3. Delete all of the project views, except for the default 3D view
4. Delete all of the schedules 
5. Delete all of the sheets 
6. Delete all of the loaded families 
7. Delete any Design Options 
8. Disable Worksharing

If the issue stops after removing "everything" from the project, then we know it is related to one of the items removed. Start removing less elements to find the group responsible. 

I hope this helps, feel free to add your own tips by sending me your comments, hopefully I'll be able to add more as I come across solutions.

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