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Creating families in Revit Building 8.1
The Family Editor in Revit Building 8.1 makes it easy to create your own
families, and save them locally or on the network. The families consist
of many types that can be loaded into any project. Revit families can be
multi-view blocks whose representation is defined in all six principal
views.
This article highlights the main procedures in the creation of a simple
piece of casework. First up is the furniture family template from the
Imperial Library. There are numerous templates to construct families
from; most have parameters already set.


In the furniture template, it is always a good idea to first save your
work. Revit families have the file extension .rfa. The interface of the
Family Editor looks similar to that of a project template with the
exception of the design bar.
Before constructing the casework, it’s important to define the materials
that will be used. This can be done by creating subcategories in the
Object Styles dialogue box.

The materials for each of the subcategories must then be determined in
the Materials Editor. Accurender provides a good selection of materials
to choose from. The capture below shows the different rendering textures
of cherry wood.

By selecting the texture from the Accurender library, there is a default
shaded color that comes with the material. This can either be altered or
left as-is. Once the materials have been defined, proceed with tiling
your views, comprising the floor plan, top, side and isometric views.
The capture below shows the casework in the four above-mentioned views.

This casework was constructed using the solid extrusion and solid sweep
tools.

Voided extrusions were used to carve out the three shelves.
The work plane tool is necessary to determine from which face to extrude
or void out from. Picking the work plane from the 3d view is a good
practice, once an initial block has been created.

To apply materials to the block, locate the Subcategory field in the
Properties dialogue box.

For this casework, two sweeps were used: one for the base trim and the
other for the trim around the top surface. The sweep profile of the base
trim was loaded in from the Imperial Library.

The other sweep profile was created using spline and line segment tools.

Once finished, the family can be loaded into any open project, which
will then be located on the Families section of the project browser
under the Furniture category.

It can then be used in any current or future project, as it now has its
own family file.

This page last edited on
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
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