Ive taken a lot of their families. They are modeled pretty well, but if you are OCD like me you will want to spend a bunch of time cleaning them out. Most of them have a TON of useless materials in them, and a ton of useless garbage parameters. I dont want that crap cluttering up my projects, but theyre decently modeled (some, anyway) for the most part.

I have no need for their wall stuff, however.

Someone loaded a family in one of our projects here.....suddenly we had like 40 new ARCAT materials... wouldn't have been a big deal if we were using 2012....alas...2011 cant purge materials.. :/

I wish it was 40. I counted about 250 in some of the ARCAT families. And purge materials doesnt work in the family editor in 2012, LOL.

good to know about the materials...........

It struck me that the downloading part of the site isn't updated past RAC2009... Now that might not really be a problem, but I wonder why?
Also: that amount of materials to delete manually? And the recreation of parameters to suit my/dutch needs = useless (except maybe for entourage stuff only needed for rendering purposes).

The plugin will download a template file from internet and transfer project standards into your current project. As far as I can tell in some short testing, there is no way to configure it with your own standards. It will NOT work with your own parameters and settings. Besides that, some (a lot) of tweaking still needs to be done in the native properties.

ARCAT Content

Thanks for the comments on the ARCAT BIM Content. I appreciate hearing that they are fairly well modeled. As far as the version, we have everything in 2009, because we know that not everyone is on subscription. Since Revit is not Backwards compatible, we use the lowest common denominator, which is 2009 at this point. We are researching to see whether or not we should upgrade to 2011, based upon how many users are still on 2009 and 2010. I tend to believe that 2011 is where most users reside, but I am looking for statistics before alienating a part of the Revit community.

With respect to the materials, I appreciate the feedback, and am beginning to purge out the unneccessary materials from all of the families immediately. Many of the older, original generic models were built on standard templates which had far too many materials contained within. It's unfortunate that you cannot purge them easily from within a project except in 2012, and do sincerely apologize for any project bloat that it might have caused you folks.

Robert Weygant
Sumex Design

I haven't used any ARCAT content, but think it's awesome that Aaron mentions the fact the their are way too many materials, and a week later Robert is on saying he's taking care of the problem.

As I've said before, this forum kicks ass. :thumbsup:

Robert, great to see (and hear from) you here. Always nice to have the subject of our discussions participate. You might even stick around as some others did. It's addictive you know...

About the content:
I can see where you're coming from, but it seems like a missed opportunity to me. A lot (and I do mean a LOT) has been improved in the creation of families since 2009. Not major stuff but there are a whole bunch of minor improvements to constraining, usage of parameters, etc that aren't there in 2009. Sticking to that means (to me) that your families might not be all they can be. Besides that, in 2009 keeping families small was a far greater issue then nowadays.
I´m just saying: could it be useful to keep multiple libraries optimized for multiple versions?

About the materials: this is why I advocate the use of material parameters (don't know if you use them or not). It means no actual materials in your families, users can assign them as needed. Saves a whole lot of trouble.
Also, I couldn't discover the usage of shared parameters. Am I right, or just looking at the wrong families? In terms of scheduability I find this an absolute must-have. You might want to consider throwing in a "standard" ARCAT Shared Parameter file.

Could you look at my posting #6 and tell me if I'm correct about the plugin? Honestly, I've just looked at your You Tube videos and did some bare minimum testing. From what I can see, it's not possible to incorporate your own standard walls in this plugin right?
Is it possible to save back wall types from a project to the ARCAT template file?
Is there going to be the same kind of plugin for Floors and Roofs?
If this is the case, then I would definately use it. Cause it gives me the possibility to define a huge number of walls/floors/roofs without bloating my template.