Best ways to manage file size

Hi everyone, I’m currently doing a project were I’m maxing out my computers capabilities and was looking for ways to improve this for the next one and hopefully find a way to reduce file size. I was thinking about getting either visual arc or utilising rhino in revit just for ease of use as I’ve been doing most of my stuff as sculptural rhino modelling and grasshopper bakes where changing anything is a pain but does anyone know if these also help with the file size with the increased reliance on parametric functions? Any advice would be really helpful

what do you mean by this - RAM? just immense files, or display? You might look into splitting up the project using Worksessions.

https://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/7/help/en-us/index.htm#commands/worksession.htm?

-Pascal

Mainly RAM, the file I’m working on at the moment is now almost 1GB and trying to link all the various parts of my model as seperate blocks into a blank file just seems to be slowing it down even more. I haven’t looked into worksessions before though so I’ll try that on the next one. Thank you for the help Pascal, I really appreciate how much you’ve taught me whilst I’ve been learning this

Hi -

It’s impossible for us to guess what kind of things you are modeling but, based on this:

it doesn’t sound like VA or Revit would help to reduce the size of your model.
-wim

I use it for architecture so I end up with quite complex polysurfaces like trusses and steel framed glass roofs that could each contain thousands of surfaces. This is fine up to a point but if you’ve got 20 individual roof frames and 50 trusses then the file quickly becomes almost a GB and maxes out my RAM before the rest of the building has gone in. Linking into a base model helps up to a point but even then it becomes laggy and crashes with a 30MB file I guess because it’s still trying to read all that geometry just in a different file. I was thinking about getting a new computer anyway but I just thought I’d check on here before I did. I thought with objects like complex trusses then defining it as a family in revit might somehow help, bit of a hail Mary but you never know.

Extrusion is much more lightweight than polysurfaces. Somehow you’d try to build trusses and roof frames with extrusions, if possible.

That could work for the trusses actually, might be a bit of a pain for the roof frames because they’re on double curved surfaces but I’m sure there’s a way round that

thank you