From the course: Revit: Structural Families

Learning what a family is

From the course: Revit: Structural Families

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Learning what a family is

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- [Instructor] Let's get started by explaining what a Revit family actually is. For you AutoCAD users, it's a block that you insert into a drawing, basically a group of objects that form a building component such as a desk or a window. Oh, but this is no ordinary block. In AutoCAD, we had to insert a block, explode it, stretch it, and put everything back on the correct layers. Now to family. Revit families are the cornerstone of BIM. When you insert a family into a model, you get a fully parametric, data-rich 3D object that can adapt to whatever is actually hosting the family. For example, if I insert a window family into a wall, I don't have to tell the family what size the wall is. It just knows. Better yet, when I change the wall itself, the family automatically flexes within the wall. That being said, there are a few different types of families I'd like to explore. Let's take a look at family categories. The first one is a system family. See, system families are inherent to Revit, such as a wall, floors, roofs, footings, stairs, ramps, those types of things. And also you'll see slabs as a system family. When you open up a model, you click on the slab button, you get a slab. That's a system family. To make a new system family, you can simply duplicate the one that's there. Now, another type of family category would be a component family. As you can see from this graphic here, component families are loaded into your model and can host to a system family such as framing, columns, doors, windows, and openings, trusses, angles, those types of things, even connections. I like to just say miscellaneous metals for all of that stuff. Now, the next thing we'll see are in-place families. An in-place family is actually modeled within the project itself. You need existing geometry to create it, such as this gusset plate here. So unique plates and stiffeners, slab depressions, footing steps, wall bevels, things like that. Any odd geometry that you would add to your model, you'll probably do as an in-place family. Of course, in this course, we're going to cover these in depth. Now, let's take a look at family types. For example, you see this footing rectangular. You see the graphic here. It says footing rectangular. Then there's a bunch of sizes. See, the footing rectangular is the actual family. The sizes are a type of that family. So that way, when we put a footing rectangular into our model, we can specify the different sizes without duplicating, without adding any different families. These are all different sizes of this footing. Now, the last thing to do is we can actually make our own. We have three feet, we have two-foot-six, we have two feet. We can easily go ahead and make our own footing. That's how family types works. We don't actually duplicate the family. We just duplicate the type within the family. Look at it as children. Now, they're also parametric, not just 3D. There's no 3D in the word BIM. So if we take a look at this, this is adjustable, right? We had the family types dialogue. And look at all these formulas. These are the formulas for a family we will do in this course. We can flex this to any situation and they are also parameter-driven. They're also definable. We can drill in and redefine a well-made family. The reason I say that is if we take the time upfront to make a good family, we can redefine it all we want without having to worry about it blowing up. And they're data-rich. That's that building information modeling working for us. Okay, so let's start making some families.

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