Family prep - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that your cabinet is finished and ready to go and be loaded into your project, we now want to save it so that we can do that. There's two things that you could do, you could go ahead and just go to the File menu and do a Save As, and you would call this a family and then you would go and place this in the correct location. Obviously, I have already saved this file from before, because I've been working on this as I've been doing this tutorial. But if this is your first time hitting Save, this is where you're going to want to do that. At this point, I just called this base cabinet because that's what it is. I try to make sure that my naming is right along the lines of what the actual product is or component is because it can get confusing extremely quickly. You also want to make sure that you do this process, because if you do not, when you go to save it into your project, it saves as the name family. And if you do this with multiple families, it can get confusing quickly. So this is why we take this step. I'm going to actually hit Cancel, because like I said, I've already saved this. The other way that you can do this is to go up top to the top right inside of the Create ribbon and click on Load into Project. You have two options here, you have Load into Project, and then you have Load into Project and Close. A lot of times what I like to do is go ahead and do Load into Project and Close, because what that does is it takes all of the windows that I have opened associated with this component and closes those as well. Revit has a tendency to start stacking tabs after you get so many across the top of your interface, and you don't really realize how many tabs you actually have open for your model. So right now I'm going to go ahead and click on that button, Load into Project and Close. And a lot of times, if I had not hit save before, a question would have popped up then that would have also asked if I wanted to go ahead and save that family. Because I've already hit saved, there's no need to hit that button. So now the file is inside of our project. Now, if you look over here inside of your project browser and come down to families. And remember, I categorize this as casework. So I'm going to click the casework button. There is the base cabinet that I have pulled in. What I can do, I'm going to actually go to a floor plan, so I'm going to scroll up to the top here, and I'm going to go to floor plan Level 1. And this is where I'm going to actually place that in to the file. And I can either do it one of two ways, I can hit the plus sign here. And I now see two different options for sizes 'cause we were working on a 36 inch and a 48 inch. I'm going to actually click on the 36 inch for right now. And I can either take this, drag this over to the file and release. And it now shows the cabinet here that we have been working on. The other thing that you will notice is if you see my mouse, and I'm going to actually go somewhere we can actually see it, instead of looking inside of the floor there. My mouse is usually at the place of the rear of the cabinet that I have created. So just a little note there for placement purposes, and I can now take this and place this right into the model, and there it is. And I'm going to hit Escape twice, and it's now sitting inside of the file. Now it's actually inside of the wall, so I'm going to actually pull it out and make sure that it is sitting, I'm actually going to do it down here because it's the same thickness, it's a 3/4 inch thickness. And it's now up against the wall. The other way of doing this would it be to go up to component and it is now showing up inside of your type selector as being an option as well. One last thing I want to point out though, oops, I clicked something here, so I'm just going to hit delete. As you can see, the way I have this named, I have this named based off of the video that we were doing this work in. However, if I were to keep this name for this cabinet in here, this name is what's going to show up inside of my schedule. So what I would actually want to do is I want to rename this. And what you can do to rename this file, all you have to do is come over here to your project browser, click on the file that you want to change the name to. And you're going to actually click on the family itself, not its types. You'll do a right click and you'll just say Rename. And then you go ahead and take out the items that you want to take out the terms. And I'm just going to go ahead and pull this out there and now I just have a base cabinet. I'm going to hit Enter, and there it is. So now when you go to actually schedule this item, it's going to schedule with this name and not the other name that you had before. It does not change the name inside of your library where you keep your family file. So whether it's inside a windows Explorer folder, or some other type of folder, or maybe on a flash drive or something like that where you keep your files. It's only going to change the name inside of this project alone. So I actually like that because there are some times when you need to modify a family or component, in this case, inside of a project, but you don't want to modify the family as a whole because you want to keep that one named as it is. And it allows you to do this inside of Revit.