ANZRS Revit Standards

Revit Standards for Family Creation

Version 3 of the ANZRS Revit Standards was released last week.  For those not familiar with this, it all started at the Revit Technology Conference in 2009, held in Melbourne, Australia.  A lively discussion about the poor quality of Revit content 'out there' led to a group of very dedicated Revit users putting together a set of standards for creation of Revit families - this was primarily aimed at content providers, suppliers, manufacturers etc in the Australia and New Zealand markets.  In fact it is incredibly useful to anyone creating Revit families anywhere in the world.

The ANZRS Family Creation Pack (as the document is labelled) takes into account principles that were defined in the Autodesk "Revit Model Content Style Guide", but it goes beyond that.

Objectives of ANZRS include:

• To establish minimum compliance standards for content shared or sold within Australia and New Zealand.
• Document best practice for Revit content creation, which may exceed the minimums.
• Establish a more extensive collection of 'Shared Parameters'.
• Establish a list of consistent object subcategories.
• To also cover discipline specific requirements for Revit Architecture, Structure and MEP content.

When you go to the ANZRS website, you need to register (at no cost) before you can download the documents.  In version 3 the format of these has been made easier to work with in the form of 3 PDFdocuments:

• Updates in version 3
• Checklist
• Full ANZRS Family Creation Pack

The checklist is a short document, which in itself is a very useful guide for content creation even if you have not wholly implemented the standards.

The full pack is a comprehensive document crammed with good information that you can wholeheartedly embrace as part of your Revit standards or else incorporate those parts you can into your existing systems.  The more people who take this on board, the better chance we all have of working with good quality Revit content in the future.

The initiative of the group of people who put ANZRS together is to be highly commended.  The huge amount of hard work they put into the planning and creation of this set of standards is greatly appreciated.  To my shame, I was not one of those people, but I hope to make a small contribution by helping to publicise ANZRS.