How to Trim and Extend Reference Planes in Revit
Revit can’t trim or extend reference planes. You can trim walls, lines, beams, pipes and almost everything else, but reference planes are left out. I don’t know why, and I don’t like it.
Why tidy reference planes matter
Tidy reference planes won’t make your family or project any better on their own. The geometry stays the same, and the parameters work the same way.
What changes is how easy the file is to read and edit. Reference planes are the skeleton of a family. When they are clean and sensibly sized, you can see right away how the family is built and what drives what. When they run across the whole view, overlap each other and stop at random points, every edit starts with figuring out what you’re looking at.
That matters for you, and even more for whoever opens the file after you.
I’ll admit it: when I open someone else’s family and the reference planes are all over the place, it bothers me. At the same time, I know how it happens. On a real project, tidying up gets pushed to “later”, and later never comes. It happens to all of us.
The usual workaround
Without Trim/Extend, you have two options:
- Drag the endpoints by hand and try to line them up with the geometry.
- Unpin the reference plane, extend it, and pin it again.
Both work, but both are slow and fiddly. It’s clumsy enough that skipping the cleanup feels reasonable, which is exactly why so many families end up messy.
A simple command that fixes it
So I built a small tool for it. It’s one simple command that trims and extends reference planes, and it works both in families and in projects.
It doesn’t do anything fancy. It just makes cleaning up quick enough that you actually do it.
You can see it in action here: YouTube link
Free, and it will stay free
The tool is free to use and will stay that way.
It will be released soon as part of Via BIM Tools, together with more tools and improvements I’m still working on. If you’d like to test it before then, get in touch and I’ll share the installer link.
