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