Creating seed families - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] The first step in creating any piece of Revit family content is to start with a template file. Now there are several template files provided with the software when you install it. Those can vary a little bit depending on the installation options you chose and what jurisdiction you're in, but for the most part, you should see a very similar list to what I'm going to see here. So let me show you where you access that list. You can either go to the file menu, highlight new, and choose family to create a new family. Or, let me click away from there, and you could simply use the new link right here on the recent files screen. That will get you to the same place. So in either instance, it will open up the new family dialog and list out all of the Revit family templates that are installed on your system. So once again your list might vary slightly from mine. But you should have something that says generic model. Now it might say generic model, it might say metric generic model, it might vary slightly, but just make sure you're not choosing one of the ones that ends in the word based. So those are all hosted versions of the generic model. So one that requires a wall host, or a roof host, or a floor host. In our case, I just want a free-standing generic model that doesn't require any hosts. This is by far our most basic Revit family template. So, I'm going to select that. And I'll click open. Now that will create a new family based on that template. So, up here on the top of my screen, it says I'm in family one. So what I'm going to do here is press W T, window tile, and what that shows you is that that actually opened up four separate windows. We have a floor plan, a 3-D view, and two elevations that were created from that template. I'm also going to type ZA to zoom all the windows to fit. And now you can see that there's also some reference planes contained in this template. Now I've got one here going horizontally that if I click on it, it's called center, front, back. And then this one here is the center between left and right. So, you've got the left side, the right side, so that's the center between those. Both of those are pinned. And if you click on the properties pallet, and scroll down, you'll see that both of them are set to define the origin. So in other words, these two reference planes mark the origin of this family, the insertion point of this family. Now if you're unable to select those two reference planes that's because they're pinned. And that means that over here on the select drop down, you have select pinned elements turned off. So all you need to do is check the box right there to select pinned elements, and then you'll be able to select both of those reference planes. So I do recommend that you have select pinned elements turned on for this exercise. All right, so the first thing that I want to do in this template is I want to add the stuff to it that I'm going to use for, not only the current family that I'm about to create but maybe several families that I'm about to create. In other words, let's say that you're about to embark on a task where you might be creating 10 or 20 families. Well, what you'd want to do is think about the needs of each of those 10 or 20 families, and try and come up with the collection of common settings that they would all share. And then you start with those things. So maybe they all need left and right reference planes. Maybe they all need a width and a height dimension. Maybe they all need even some basic geometry, or some other settings. If you configure all of those basic settings within your first file and then save it, you can save it into something that I like to call a seed family. And all a seed family is is a starting point for a collection of families that you're planning to create. So that's what I'm going to do here, is I'm going to imagine a few basic settings that I might want to have for several families I'm about to create and I'm going to create a really simple example of a seed family. Now I highly recommend you do this 'cause it'll just save you a lot of time. And it'll also give you more consistency from one family to the next. Now you certainly could create your own custom Revit family templates if you want. But that's a little bit more permanent. I like the seed family approach because it's a little bit more flexible. Because at any time I can edit the seed and resave it. So, the first thing I want to do in this seed is consider its units. So I'm going to go to the manage tab. Click on the project units button, or type UN. And for now I'm just going to focus on the length units. And if I click that button right there, you can see that my file is currently in feet and fractional inches. So it's in imperial units in feet and inches. So just because I don't really want to focus on units at all in this course, I'm going to change that to decimal feet. And I'll change the number of decimal places to three. Now this way, even though you'll be working in an imperial file, you'll be able to just type in whole numbers or decimal numbers and you won't really have to think too much about what the actual sizes of those are. We're mainly going to be concerned with relative sizes and overall proportions, and less about actually distances. So by setting it to just a generic decimal value like that it'll just make it easier for us to ignore the units. So I'll go ahead and click okay on that. And now the result of that is, if I go back to the create tab, and here on the datum panel, click reference plane, or type RP. I'm going to create a vertical reference plane off to the left hand side. Notice that the number that appears here for the temporary dimension is in decimal values. It's not feet and inches anymore. It's just whole numbers, or decimal numbers. So, I'm just going to make that a nice round value of three. Okay. Now right next to that, you've got click to name on either end of the reference plane. And you can click on either of those two labels and give this a name. So this is the left edge. So I'll just go ahead and call that left. Now let's repeat that across the bottom. So I'm going to click a couple points to create a horizontal reference plane. Set that distance to two. Click to name. And I'll call this front. Now I'll click my modify tool to cancel out of there. Select my front reference plane. Mirror that around its center. And then it suggests the name center LS. I'll change that to back. Do it again for this one. Select left, mirrored around the center. And instead of center LT, I'll change that to right. Now I'm going to click off into empty space here just to deselect everything. And I've now described this sort of box surrounding my center point. Now what I want to do is make sure that that box always stays centered. So to do that I'll add some dimensions. So I can get to the dimension tool right here on the ribbon, or I can type DI, and I need two dimensions in each direction, one that goes from left to center to right, one that goes from left to right, skipping the center, and then the same in this direction, from back to center to front, back to front, skipping center, and then cancel the command. Now, the numbers are impossibly tiny and very hard to read. So the next thing that I'm going to do is adjust the scale of the view. Now the scale of the view makes no difference in the family editor. So you can choose whatever scale makes things more legible. Now, I am still seeing a list of imperial scales. So if that really does bother you, you can always open a metric template instead. But this will be the last time that we'll focus on the scale anyway, so I'm not going to worry about that too much. But I'm just going to change each one of these views to quarter inch. And that will make that text a little bit larger. And now I'll just zoom in, just a touch, with my wheel and I can actually read the numbers now. All right, so the next step is to take the continuous dimension, the horizontal one that goes three three, and what I want to do is click this little toggle here to turn on the equality. I'll do that again for this one. And then for the six foot horizontal dimension, I want to label that with a new parameter. Now you can do that right here on the label dimension panel. And there's a create parameter button. I'll click that. And I'll name this new parameter just capital W. Now you could call it width, you could call it X Y, you could name it anything you want. In my seed families, I like to use a generic name. So that's why I'm just using capital W. And I kind of do that on purpose because it reminds me that that was the seed family and then I might change it later. But if you know for sure that in all of your 10 or 20 families, you want this to be called width, or you want it to be called you know length dimension one or whatever it is, you can go ahead and put that name in. But in this case I'm going to keep it generic. And call it W. And then I'll accept all the other defaults. And click okay. I'll repeat the same thing in the other direction, creating a new parameter. Calling this one D, and clicking okay. So that's my width and that's my depth. So now, I want to test both of those, it's good practice to just test them and make sure they're working. So I'll select W, click right on the label. Try a smaller value, maybe five. You could see everything gets closer together. That's working pretty well. Try it again with D. Maybe try a bigger number. Also five. That's working. So that looks pretty good. So I can click away to deselect. So I now have this little flexible rig here of reference planes, left, right, front, back, that are defining a nice little box shape. And they're being controlled parametrically. Now that is by far the most basic thing that we could do in a seed family. There is lots more that we could do. But what I want to do now is just save this file. Give it a name. So I'm going to go to the file menu. Choose save. Click my desktop. And I'm going to name this thing GM, for generic model, underscore seed, to remind myself that it's a seed. And for now what I'm going to do is just add the word intermediate to the end of that name, just to remind myself that this is a progress file. And we're going to stop here for this video. But we're going to continue with this file in the next video to add more features to our seed file. So I'll go ahead and save this. And then we'll pick up right here where we left off in the next video.