BIM Tools Weekly

- [Instructor] Using the truss bars we had earlier, we're going to make a line-based family arraign these truss bars up. We've got a lot to do, so let's just jump in. Let's go to Families, let's go to New. Browse to your region. Let's go to Generic Model Line Based. Click Open. Now let's create a sweep. Let's click on Sweep with Sketch Path. Just make sure you type SI for snap intersection. SI for snap intersection. Hit Escape a couple times. Click Finish. Let's go to our left elevation. Let's click on Edit Profile. Now, to create some reference planes though, let's go to Create, let's go to Reference Plane. In the Draw panel, it's pick Lines. Let's offset one foot six to the left, one foot six to the right. On your Measure panel, let's click our Align Dimension button. Let's do an equally constrained dimension. Then an overall dimension. Select your three-foot dimension. Let's create parameter. Let's call it width. Click OK. Let's create another parameter. Let's right click on this reference plane. Let's create similar. Draw panel, we'll click Pick Lines, we'll offset this three feet. And add dimension, strong to weak. Select your three-foot dimension. Click Create Parameter. Let's call it height. Click OK. Hit Escape a couple times. I'm going to move my EQ dimension up just a little bit. Now I want to put three tubes in here. So we're going to go to the Draw panel. Let's click on Circle. Let's set a radius this time to two inches. These will be a little bit bigger than the others but they'll be geometric, of course. Put one here. One here here, one here. Let's select all three of these. And make sure that Center Mark Visible is checked on. Now, we need to align and lock 'em all. So let's type AL for align. Put that one, lock it, that one, pick it, lock it. See what I'm doing? Pick, pick, lock. Pick, lock. Pick, pick, lock. Good, of course, we're going to dimension 'em. Of course, we're going to put a parameter on all of these diameter dimension. Diameter dimension. Diameter dimension. Select them all. So hold down the Control key, select each of them. Click on Create Parameter. Call it Pipe Size, it's type parameter. Click OK. Hit Escape a couple times. Click Finish Edit moDe. Click Finish again. Let's go back to our ref level. I guess we'll move our dimension out of there a little bit. And let's go to our family types. Let's set our length to I don't know, to 20 feet. Click Apply. See it shoot out over there. Okay. Click OK. Now, let's go to Insert. Let's go to Load Family. Browse to where you're keeping your exercise files. Let's grab our Truss Bars. Click Open. Let's go to the Create panel. Let's click on Components. Here's our truss bars. If you hit your space bars, notice you can flip it into a different orientation. So we're going to put 'em right about here. You know how I don't like to try to put 'em in the right spot to begin with. So we're going to align and lock both axes. So we'll type AL. We're going to align, we're going to pick this reference plane first and pick this line, we're going to lock it. We're going to set the center reference plane. We'll pick the center reference plane on this and we shall lock it. Okay, okay, let's add some parameters now. So let's go to our family types. Let's start adding some parameters. So let's click on the New Parameter button. This one, I want to call Number of Bars. This is going to be an instance parameter. And the type of parameter needs to be an integer. It's got to be a whole number. We'll group it under Graphics. We'll click OK. We'll add another one. Let's click on New Parameter. We'll call it Bar Spacing. It's an instance parameter. We can keep that under dimensions. We'll click OK. Let's create another new parameter. Let's call it Not to Exceed Spacing. This will be an instance parameter. And we'll keep it under dimensions. Let's click OK. So for our Not to Exceed Spacing, let's just type in, I don't know, four feet just to give us a number to work with. Now let's jump the number of bars. These are going to equal length divided by Not to Exceed Spacing. Then we hit Enter. Oh, five bars. For our actual bar spacing, we're going to want to go length divided by number of bars. Does it make sense? Hit Enter. Click Apply. Click OK. Now let's select our truss family here. Let's click on Edit type. Let's start tying stuff in. So for our height, three feet, we're going to click on our associate and associate that with height. And click OK. For our width, let's go down to Width. We'll grab the associate parameter. We'll associate that with width. Click OK. Now for length. Let's click on this associate. This will be our bar spacing. We'll click OK. Click Apply, click OK. Now, let's go to our front elevation and move our ref level label out of the way. It's kind of annoyingly in the way. Let's move it. Select your web member family. Let's click Array. Click a point here, click a point out to here. Hit Escape a couple times. Now, let's click on our Aligned Dimension. Go from here to here. Put your point after this. I'm going to select a three foot five and for our label, we're going to put it on bar spacing. Revit now gives us this warning saying constraints routine geometry in the family. It's okay, we're fine. Click OK. Now, if we select this array, notice that we can select this number two here. And for our label, we can hit the dropdown. Now we can go to Number of Bars. Hit Escape a couple times. Go to a 3D view. Got it. Okay, let's click Save. We'll call it Truss_ I don't know, Line Family. It's a terrible name. Call it whatever you'd like. Click options, maximum one, click OK. Hit Save. Now let's go to File, New, Project. We use the Imperial Structural Template. Click OK. Click on Close Inactive Views, go to the 3D view of our family. Load it into the projects. And let's just draw it out. 60 feet, wowser, that's big. Go to 3D view. And we've got it. Let's set our visual style to realistic. There you go. That's how you create a cool truss.