Selecting the correct template - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this lesson we're going to examine what Revit family templates are and why it's important to use the correct one. We're also going to take a look at the family template interface. (laughs) I remember when I first started creating families I viewed these templates as mere suggestions. I don't need a template. Long story short, I needed a template and I needed the right one. Although, this may seem a bit remedial it is necessary just to peruse the different templates and look at how the family editor works. The objective of this exercise is to take a look at the necessary tools to get us started in the right direction when it comes to families. So in Revit, you'll notice down at the very bottom here, we have families and it's going to list a few of the most recent families you had open. What I like to do is under Families, obviously we can open a family or we can create a new family, so under Families go New, this should direct you to your C drive where your families are kept. Now, if you're at a company that has a network drive this may send you to your network drive. If I kind of come down through and start selecting a few of these items we'll see that they're pretty different in terms of what we see with geometry but the biggest thing is the fact that these families are allocated for these specific objects. So for example, I want to scroll down to the profile, we have Profile here. We have Profile Hosted here. I want to use Profile Hosted. Let's take a look at this. Click Open. So, in here we'll see that it's hosted so this is our host. We're going to create a little cove mold here so we're going to pretend that this host means wall and this insertion point means top so our insertion point for our family is going to be right here. That's all good, that's all important but under the Properties panel on the Create tab, click on this button here, this is the Family Category and Parameters button. Go ahead and click that. Now we're going to see that this family is going to be a profile. That's a big deal when we load this into a project. Revit needs to categorize these things and find them in terms of what they are in this list. Right now this is just a profile, that's all we're going to get but as we get further down the line we're going to select generic models and we'll be able to choose exactly the family category that we want. Now as we can see we have some choices based on a profile so for profile usage, we can click the dropdown, we can kind of scroll down and see exactly what we want to use it as. Now, unfortunately you can't add to this list. If none of the items here really pertain to what you want, it's okay to keep it generic and yeah, I think mine wants to be a wall sweep. It's not going to change the functionality, just for scheduling purposes. Click OK, now it says Profile Usage Wall Sweep. If we scroll down in our properties we'll see that that's pretty much all the choices we have because what we're going to do is we're just going to draw a simple shape here, no 3D involved. So all the choices we have here are all we need. Let's save this. Go to the blue File tab, let's go to Save As, notice that we can only save it as a family. Click Family, browse where you're keeping your exercise files, I'm going to go Chapter 1 Exercise Files. I'm going to call this C-O-V-E, click on Options, for my backups I just want to have one and we'll see why we're going to do that in a little while. This will save the backup as a .rfa and you'll be able to see it when you go to open. It's kind of annoying so we'll take a look at that later. Click OK, click Save. Okay, now you know about the templates and the interface, it's important to know that each template offers functionality that others may not and most importantly, the template is setup to know exactly what it is you're modeling.