AECOtools 1.21

In 1.21.0 Super Purge stopped with an error as it opened. It's fixed, and the Safe / Review / Caution group headings now show their colours as intended.

• Transparency and Self-Illumination layers — glass and glowing surfaces — each from a value or from an image.
• Reflectivity sliders: how much a surface reflects, alongside Roughness for how sharp.
• New Identity and Graphics tabs: description, class, manufacturer, cost, keynote, mark and the rest, plus shading colour and surface and cut patterns with a preview drawn from the project's own patterns. Your office's own material parameters appear there automatically.
• Save changes updates the material you opened with Edit; Create in Revit always makes a new one and never overwrites.
• Resize a photo — tile it or stretch it — and Use high-res library image swaps a stock Autodesk texture for its largest copy.
• An eyedropper on every colour field, the name filled in from the base image, and texture files named after the material.
• Adding joints keeps the base image's surface relief, scatter covers rectangular textures edge to edge, and cracks show on a plain colour.
• Fixed: materials now take the texture size you set (they were landing at Revit's default 1 ft), image materials no longer render with their gloss reversed, and normal maps are no longer tilted.

Planting and the Materials editor now have full guides, and the ? button appears on every tool window — including Roundtrip, where it was missing.

Place trapeze hangers along cable tray, duct, pipe and conduit runs, with rods sized to the structure above.

• Picks the right hanger for the run — duct, pipe or electrical — and loads it into the project for you.
• Set the spacing, the gap at an open end of a run, and a separate gap either side of a fitting.
• Rods are measured to the slab or structure above, each side separately, so a hanger under a sloping or stepped slab gets two different rod lengths. Linked structural models count too.
• Trays stacked above get tiers on the same hanger, and side-by-side runs share one trapeze. Edit stack group lets you take a tray out of the stack — for an existing tray, or another trade's — by clicking it in the view.
• Hanger width snaps to a supplier's list (or your own), with an optional up-size and Left / Centre / Right alignment for set-out.
• Avoids ducts and pipes in the way: it slides, nudges or widens a hanger to clear them, and anything it can't clear is marked Known Clash and counted.
• Each hanger remembers its run. Move the run, press Update, and the hangers follow.

Build realistic materials in layers — a product photo or colour, tile joints from a bond or a hatch pattern, grime, scatter — with a live preview, and create them in the project.

• Product photos keep their real width and height, and tiles repeat seamlessly — no half brick at the edge of the texture.
• Edit a material you made earlier, or start from any material already in the project.
• Every material card in AECObank has Edit, Paint (click faces to paint them) and Apply (pick an element, then choose which of its material parameters to set).

Draws the hatch of floors, toposolids, subdivisions and roofs flat in plan, instead of Revit's pattern on every sloping face — using transparent filled regions that follow their elements when they change.

• Hand over to AECOTransmit with one tick: it opens on the output folder with the drawings already read in. Drawing numbers, titles and revisions come from the model rather than the file name, and the revision's description and date become the issue's title and date.
• Revisions as print sets — pick "Rev C – 15/10/2026 (12 sheets)" and every sheet currently on that revision is ticked.
• DWG exports follow your model's DWG export setup — layers, line weights, text and units. They used to ignore it.
• Pre-flight checks before a run: sheets that would overwrite each other, sheets that will print blank, mixed paper sizes in a combined set, a folder you can't write to. It only speaks up when it finds something.
• A combined set can include other PDFs before or after the sheets — a cover letter, a specification, consultants' drawings — each bookmarked. Tick Also keep the individual PDFs to get the bound set and the singles from one run.
• Save as Sheet Set stores your selection in the model.
• Selecting rows ticks them, and a tick box in the heading replaces All / None.
• Prints through other PDF printers — PDF-XChange, Bluebeam, Adobe — with your folder and naming rules, plus Go to Folder and Copy Path when it's done.

• A new plant editor and plant library editor, Place Along, label formats, and planting and bed tag families. The starter library now includes 257 commonly specified SEQ species, with images.
• Tag runs: one tag shows the count for a run of the same plant, with lines linking the rest. Move or delete plants and the tag, lines and count keep up.
• Hand back: clear a plant's hand-edited flag and the next re-scatter lays it out again.
• Plants you place by hand are counted in the schedules.
• Legends keep themselves up to date after a Sync, Place or species edit.
• A noticeably faster Sync on large beds. Plants are no longer rotated as they're placed — Randomise rotations is a separate command for renders.
• Each species carries its Enscape asset, mature height, mature spread and root ball size through to its type.

• Drawing style and data overlay are now two separate lists, so turning on an overlay no longer costs you your drawing style.
• New overlays: Changed this session, Warnings, Levels, Phases and Issues.
• Click an issue in Live View and it opens in the AECOtrack panel, with the view moved to it.

Nearly every tool now has a ? button that opens its full guide — what it does, step by step, and the options explained. The guides are written for the tool you're using, not a general manual.

• Purges are grouped and coloured by how much they change: Safe, Review and Caution. Check All leaves the Caution group alone, so Ungroup All or Remove All Paint never happens by accident.
• Ten more cleanups: unplaced images, unused group types, line styles and patterns, filled region types and fill patterns, link types with no instances, materials, text and dimension types, empty worksets, unused revisions, and empty colour fill and area schemes. Each works out what is used and keeps it.
• Now works in the Family Editor, with purges that make sense inside a family.

• ParaControl renames or duplicates many parameters at once — find and replace, prefix, suffix — with a before / after preview that won't let a clash through. It also shows a shared parameter's GUID, which shared parameter file it came from and who added it, and can export to a shared parameter file.
• ReFlow's Copy From can read Revit's Unique Id and Element Id.

Pick which categories a payload search covers, a faster search on large models, and results graphs that filter the lists when you tick them.

• Model Audit: switching System Calculations no longer freezes Revit, and each metric explains itself.
• The Face Audit button on the Modify tab now appears for any model element — walls, floors and toposolids as well as families.

The project materials scan is remembered per project, so cloud models open their materials straight away, and Esc stops a long scan. Deleted image previews regenerate again.