Five years is a long time in Revit. Five new versions, the arrival of ACC, and a whole wave of features that may or may not belong in your template... it's time to take stock. In Episode 134 of BIM After Dark Live, I brought back Aaron Maller of Parallax Team for a deep-dive on how template strategy has evolved and where most firms are still leaving efficiency on the table.
What We Covered
The new feature split. Aaron framed it well: every release has features that are fun to model with, and then a separate set that are actually template-relevant. Most people only think about the first bucket. The second one is where template work compounds over time.
ACC and cloud deployment changed the game. When Aaron was last on the show talking templates, ACC didn't exist. Now it's central to how templates get versioned, shared, and enforced across project teams. That has real implications for how you structure your starting files.
Phase filters and view templates still trip people up. These are some of the oldest pain points in Revit and they're still not resolved. Aaron walked through how a well-built template handles phasing setup so you're not redoing it on every project.
The Revit AI assistant conversation. This was one of the more honest moments in the stream. Aaron and his team are turning off Revit's built-in AI assistant on client deployments... not because it's a bad idea, but because nobody's taking accountability for the outputs yet. They tested it live and it miscounted nested shared families. That's the kind of thing that becomes a real problem in professional practice.
Template philosophy hasn't changed, even if the tools have. Aaron's been building templates since 2006. His core idea is still the same: if you find yourself doing the same thing on every job, it belongs in the template. That discipline compounds.
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Special thanks to our sponsor this season: Guardian
