AECOtools 1.22

The COINS Auto-Section Box has been a free fixture for years. It has no Revit 2027 build, and clients asked us to carry the job on — so here it is, written from scratch and free.

• Quick Section Box — select, click, done. The box lands around the selection in the 3D view you're in. No dialog.
• Section Box — padding in millimetres, pick elements inside linked models, put the result in a new 3D view, and put the previous box back.
• Line it up with an element you pick — a wall, pipe, duct or beam. The box turns to follow it, which is what makes a long diagonal run readable instead of skewed inside a project-axis box.
• Follow Selection — switch it on and the box moves with you as you click along a run of services. A small window steers it: padding, pause, and off — closing it stops following.
• Toggle Section Box — turn the active 3D view's box off, and back on exactly as it was.
• Grids, levels, scope boxes, section marks, dimensions and tags are ignored when they're caught up in a selection, so one stray grid can't blow the box out to the site boundary. Select only a scope box and you get a box around exactly that.
• Keyboard shortcuts AS and QS (the keys the old tool used), FB for Follow Selection and BB for Toggle Section Box are offered — but only if nothing else on your machine is using them. They come alive after the next restart.

Revit duplicates as dependent one view at a time, names the result "Parent - Dependent 1", and leaves the scope box to you. A plan split over eight scope boxes is eight duplications, eight renames and eight trips to the properties palette. This does the lot in one go, and it's free.

• A set number of dependents per view, or one per scope box with that box already applied.
• Names from a pattern — {parent}, {n}, {nn}, {scopebox} — or leave Revit's own.
• Every view is listed before anything is made, and a name already in use is flagged and blocks Create, because Revit would refuse the rename and leave a "Dependent 1" behind to clean up.
• Optionally drop a view reference on each shared boundary, pointing at the view next door and turned to suit the edge.
• Views that can't take dependents — 3D views, schedules, legends, and dependents themselves — are reported with the reason rather than quietly skipped.

Rebuild a consultant's DWG or DXF details as native drafting views: detail lines on your line styles, text notes with real leaders, filled regions without doubled-up outlines, real dimensions, and one view per detail named from the sheet's own titles. Timber, steel sections, bolts, brick and block walls, linings, fasteners and more become your library's detail components. It reads the DWG itself, XREFs included.

Heating and cooling loads for two fabric scenarios — NCC minimum and an efficient fabric — set on each space. NCC editions by state, J4D6 storey by storey, outdoor air and people gains by space type (AIRAH DA9), with name rules per building class. It runs without Systems Analysis, and SyncSaver waits while it works.

• Species photos. Get images brings photos of just the plants in this project onto their types — from a folder, your office's own pictures, or the AECOtools library. Find photos matches a whole folder of pictures to species by file name. And you can share a photo you took: once AECOtech approves it, it becomes that species' photo in every office's library.
• Unit rates and costs. A rates table lists every species and pot the project uses, with its quantity, rate and total. Every schedule item and placed plant carries its rate and cost, so a schedule totals the estimate.
• Set-out coordinates. Every placed tree carries its easting, northing and RL in the model's shared (survey) coordinates, ready for a set-out schedule for the contractor.
• Tree protection zones to AS 4970-2025. Trees the project keeps — existing and not demolished, whatever family they are, so a consultant's surveyed trees count — get their TPZ and SRZ from the DBH.
• Shipped families and seed models are saved in each Revit year's own format, so they open without Revit upgrading them first.

• An Export Settings window opens at the start of Live View, Export Frag and Sync Model: Max, Balanced or Off per model, and exclusions by category, family or Revit filter.
• Curved and detailed families are rebuilt by what they are — pipes, bends, fittings, sprinklers, wall plates — with a fraction of the triangles, hidden geometry removed, and repeated families written once and reused.
• AECOtwin and Live View run on the latest viewer engine: a smaller download and faster loading.

Every cloud tool used to ask each person to register their own Autodesk Platform Services app before they could pick a cloud file — a developer's job, asked of drafters. AECOtools now signs in with its own app. Nobody is asked for a Client ID again.

• If your Autodesk account hasn't enabled AECOtools yet, the tools now say so plainly and show exactly what an ACC account admin needs to paste under Account Admin ▸ Settings ▸ Custom Integrations — Client ID, name and description, each with a Copy button. Before, the sign-in simply opened a browser full of raw JSON.
• Signing in never widens what you can see: every call still runs as you, against the hubs, projects and folders your own Autodesk permissions already allow.
• You can still use your own APS app if you'd rather — the box is in Batch Tasks settings, and blank now means "use the AECOtools app".

A folder created on the ACC website wouldn't appear in the cloud picker, and nothing short of waiting a day would bring it in — folder listings were cached as long as project metadata, in a file, so even restarting Revit didn't help.

• Folder listings now go stale after five minutes instead of twenty-four hours.
• Both cloud pickers gained a Refresh button that re-reads the tree there and then.

Most projects arrive carrying someone else's names: Polished Chrome, Chrome Metal and Finish Chrome that are all one material, forty line styles that should be six. Standards mapping reads the project against your Standards template and suggests what each one should become, for materials, appearance assets, line styles and patterns, fill patterns, filled region types, object styles, shared parameters and fonts.

• It reads names as words, not as characters: order, separators, quotes, camelCase, UK/US spelling, plurals and typos don't matter, finish words count for little, and different colours never match. A shared GUID under another name is spotted for shared parameters; font variants land on their family.
• Graphics count as evidence. Material colour, appearance asset and pattern, or line weight, colour and pattern, support a match — and clearly different graphics veto one. Identical graphics with no name match at all give a "check before accepting" suggestion rather than silence.
• Every suggestion explains itself on hover — "shares 'chrome' — simpler, more general name — in the Standards template — used 142× — graphics match" — and rows carry the project's real usage count, so you spend your attention where it matters.
• Group by standard collects each main standard with its variants beneath it and maps the lot in one go. Hide mapped and a confidence-band filter keep a long list moving.
• Template gaps lists the standards your variants point at that your template doesn't actually contain, biggest first, with project uses and library families — the names worth adding to the template. Copy or export to CSV.
• An impact preview before you apply: merges, renames, property changes and deletes, what they touch, and the risks called out — parameter renames that stop formulas, schedules, tags and filters matching; subcategory deletes; big merges; targets missing from the template; and merges onto a target that looks different.
• Apply is one undo step, and a before/after check reports off-standard counts per category with what's left.
• Your materials library can serve as the materials standard, so library names count as on-standard and become suggestion targets. A template or materials file saved in an older Revit is upgraded into a cached copy beside it and reused until the original changes.
• Batch Tasks T14 applies a saved mapping set across many models unattended, with the before/after counts in the CSV.

The Bank and the Materials editor now work inside a family, not just a project — so a material built for a family is made where it's needed. Importing a material no longer overwrites one imported moments earlier.

The website now carries the complete guide for every free tool, not a summary: Super Purge, AECOprint, Para Control, Sheet Generator, Cleanup Tools and Sheets Tools — the same text that sits behind the ? button in Revit.

No AECOtools tool writes into a Desktop Connector folder any more — the Bank, Materials, Planting, Batch Tasks, AECOprint, SyncSaver, AECOTransmit, Hub Backup, ParaControl, Roundtrip and the rest save their working files elsewhere, so nothing turns up as unexpected files syncing to the cloud.

Update now works from any tray in a stacked group — select or pick any of them and the whole group's hangers update.

• Systemiser takes flex runs and air terminals, not just rigid pipe and duct.
• Mission Control can filter a payload search in or out.
• Rooms to Floors / Ceilings: the type list can be ticked again, and the offset is in project units.

• AECOprint has an Export PDFs tick box, so a run can be CAD-only, and it no longer answers Revit's "resources are not up to date" prompt with Close.
• Super Purge: one click ticks a purge.
• SyncSaver tells you when a crashed session left a model locked.

Reading clashes is much faster (a large set went from 172 s to 6 s), and statuses you push reach whole clash groups.