Parametric Window Family - Revit Tutorial

hey guys welcome to another binary day tutorial today I'm going to show you guys how to make a parametric window family so the first thing we want to do is go to new hover over the arrow and then go to the family from the list here just scroll down to window and you want the one that just says window you don't want the long with trim we're going for more of a modern look so we're going to keep it plain and simple it open so if you go to the 3d view by clicking on the house here and let's just change it to shaded what you're presented with is just the wall with an opening already in it so if I hover over here you'll see this opening cut and that's what every window family gives you so start off let's go to the exterior view again here you have let me just change the scale here to make the text a little smaller so you have two parameters here one is a default sill height so if I if I click on that and then click again I can change the height of that and that's to put it back to I can make it 2 foot 6 and then the height here is also a parameter so if I click on it and then click it again I can make this window taller or I can make it shorter but I'll put it back to 6 then if you go to the plan view and I'll just change the scale again you can see here I have the width of three feet so again if I select that and then click it again type in five you can see this opening is bigger also if I go to the 3d view again the opening is bigger the other way to change the parameters is if you go to this families type button over here click that and you can see all the parameters that are within this family so up here you have the dimensions height and width and if you scroll down a bit under other is default sill height so let's make a window go back to the exterior view and what's really happening with these parameters is that these dimensions or these reference lines are dimensioned with this with this dimension here and it's given a parameter so what we want to do is anything we draw we want to snap to these reference lines the horizontal ones and the vertical ones so if I go over here to create extrusion first thing you want to do is under work plane here click on set and make sure it's on the reference plane that you want so for our instance we're going to use reference plane Center that way no matter how thick the wall is or how thin it is the wall the window will always be placed in the center of the wall so click OK then what you want to do is use the rectangle tool and just go from this corner of the opening to this corner then with without hitting escape keep the rectangle tool selected and then change the offset to let's say whatever you want but we'll go 4 inches then click on the same corner here and if you notice it's offsetting outside so just press space and it will all set to the inside then click here to finish it so let's hit the green check and if I change the height you can see that this this mullion let's say is going along for the ride the reason why that is if I go go back here and go to edit extrusion and then go to view and turn on the visibility graphics under annotations there's this automatic sketch dimensions so what's happening here is that Revit is making a lot of assumptions for you so since you drew these lines right on this reference plane it's giving it a dimension of zero here zero up here zero here and zero here it's assuming that you want to always be on this reference line then since we offset four inches with another rectangle it so it's assuming that you want this to be four inches off of this reference plane so if you're in a rush you can just leave it and you probably be okay but just to be sure let's lock in these dimensions so the first thing you want to do is go back to the modify tab click on the align tool click the reference plane first and then click the sketch line and once you do that you'll see this padlock come up just click it and now it's locked to that reference plane and just repeat that four times click the click the reference plane sketch line lock reference plane sketch line lock and lock then we want to do is just dimension from here to the reference plane so use your align dimension which is a usually quick shortcut here or you can go to ant 8 aligned click on the reference plane then the sketch line click anywhere in the white space so to finish it and then click the padlock and repeat that four times or repeat it three times reference plane sketch clicking the whitespace and then lock that and last one and being that there's still a temporary dimension here it's letting me know that I miss this one so I'm going to go back to the modified modify tab click a line click the reference plane click that sketch line and then lock now there's no automatic sketch dimensions here so again if I go to visibility graphics you almost want to keep this on so that you always know what you have and have-not locked because you might run into errors later on when the family becomes more complicated so let's click OK go back to modify and finish the sketch so if I go back to the 3d view you can see here that this extrusion is all over the place so select it again and you have two options to change this you can either just change it right here in the properties panel without going back into the extrusion or if you click on edit extrusion it's still here so we want our overall width to be 4 inches so we want it to end at 2 inches and start at minus 2 inches and let me just change the scale here again so what that did once you'll notice when I finish it it's exactly 4 inches from the center of the wall and you can check that in plan if I use my fuf I press tab select this line you can see that this is the center front back reference plane and when I select the extrusion it's showing here that's the reference plane that is based off of and it's going to inches away and 2 inches back and you want to do this so that when you have different wall types so let's say this wall is default to 6 inches I click Edit type look at it again and I'll make it 8 inches you can see the wall got bigger but the window stayed the same and that's exactly in the center so next what you want to do is make a piece of glass so let's go to the exterior view go to create extrusion and then again you want to click the rectangle tool no offset this time and just pick the frame that you already drew from this corner to that corner and hit escape so you can see that the same dimensions are here again so you if you use the aligned dimension tool click the reference plane and you want to be careful here since that there's the sketch line and then the window frame that we drew before it's most likely going to default to the other extrusion so press tab until the line is thick and then click it and then you can lock it so again click the reference plane and you can see how it's not really that bright and it's if you look in the bottom here when I hover over here you can see it's saying excusing shape handle if I press tab now saying line reference that's what you want you want the sketch line otherwise if I just click here you can see it's grayed out meaning I can't even do anything with this now I'm stuck with it so if I try that again go to the line click here and then press tab click away and lock it and I have one more okay the other way that we could have done this is let me just delete this real quick and I go to pick lines and I click lock here hover over one of these lines and then press tab until they all highlight and then click now the sketch lines are locked to the face of the frame either way works great this way that I just showed you now is best if you're in a rush because it's a lot quicker but the first way is a lot safer because each line is always based off of this line maybe later on you got you might make this thinner or you adjust it or you delete a line in the extrusion you're going to lose this relationship however if you dimension if I delete this draw a rectangle again if you always dimension to the reference line or to a reference line you have a less of a chance of failure so just to mention these real quick again lock it reference line lock it I think that says just make sure these are all locked locked locked okay click the check and I can just delete this reference at this dimension here so if I go to 3d view again you can see that this extrusion is crazy so just change the distance here so let's say I want a half inch thick piece of glass I'll type in a quarter inch at the end and - a quarter inch let's start so now for some materials we want to do select this the inner piece which is the glass and for the subcategory where it says none click in there you'll get this arrow and then just change this to glass and then what happened was it changed the line weight and the line type of this object and it also gave it a glass material and the reason why I did that is if I go to manage object Styles here you can see under the windows category where glasses Revit defaults giving anything that has a subcategory of glass a glass material so if I hit OK I select this one I change this subcategory to frame hit OK you can see now it has a weird green line which is fine because if I go to manage and then object Styles I can change what the frame subcategory will look like so I've got a line color just make this black and the glass I'll make this black too and you know that you want your your frames let's say I want this frame to be 2 inches our line weight of 2 I'll just select here and make this too okay so we can just test the parameters if I go to modify family types and here move this over for the height let's make this 7 hit apply you can see the top grows and the width like that for hit apply and you can see it shrinks so normally what you also want to do so you don't change this every time is you can add a family-type soap here the name is blank so if I click new family instead of type 1 let's call it the size of what it is so it's 4 feet by 7 feet hit OK and I can make a new type 2 so if I want to be 5 feet by 8 feet I'll just call it that and then hit OK you can see this change and then all I have to do is change the height to 8 feet and the width to 5 feet and there you have it and if I go if I go back to that same dialog box the family types I can switch at any time between the two now I'm going to load this into a project so I'll hit load into project here and I just happen to have a blank project 1 file open and it wants me to place a window but I don't have any walls so just going to hit escape go to wall here draw a wall out go back up here to window and you can see I have my family 1 normally you want to give it a good name other than just family and you can see I have the two sizes so when I place it when I click you can see now place that window in and even cut the wall I want to change it to the other one I'll just click the five foot but 8 by 8 foot and click here so I'm going to just change this to a quarter inch scale I'm zooming back in and you can see here that this glass if I go to thin lines you can see the two pieces of glass but if I turn it back on it looks terrible the reason for that is if I go to manage and then object Styles let's scroll all the way down to Windows and I open this up you can see since we made that we made the glass object here an actual subcategory of glass you can see the default cut weight for glass is a thickness of 4 so let's just change that to 2 and hit apply and you can see you got a little thinner maybe let's make it 1 so now it's finally readable also the frame and mullen here maybe this is too thick so you can change this to 2 and there you go also whenever you place a window in it the sill height here is 2 foot 6 you can always change it after the fact so let's go to the 3d view and let's just make it shaded if I select any of these windows here still height I can make a two-foot you can see it drops down you make this one two feet and it drops down if you know that you always want your window sill height to be a certain certain dimension you can always go back to the family so I'll just click Edit family here open up the parameters again and then just change this default silly to two feet and hit apply and the difference between this parameter and these two parameters is that this is a type parameter meaning it'll change whenever you change this and this is an instance parameter where the default number will change however when I load it back in I go back to a plan view and I go back to window and I place the window here this this is an instance where I can change it even though the type is still the same so go back to the 3d view I select both of these windows you can see they're both the family 1 5 foot but 8 by 8 foot but if I just select one of them and give this cell height of 4 feet this one is unaffected similarly similarly to this one if I just copy it over I can make this 4 feet and it doesn't affect this window so I hope this helped you guys and if this helped you in any way be sure to like it and if you want to get more great videos from BIM every day make sure you subscribe thanks

Channel: bimEveryday Tutorials

Views: 73,146

Rating: 4.9107141 out of 5

Keywords: Revit, Autodesk Revit, Revit Architecture, Architecture, BIM, parametric window, window, Revit Family

Id: U6Hc26vqTO4

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2016