Revit Masterclass: Family Creation #1

[Music] good answer you're watching the odds even guru and today I'm going to be covering a referent master class on Revit content creation so it's a different format to my usual video it'll be quite similar but I'm going to work at a slightly faster pace and I usually would in my tutorials in order to cover more advanced techniques and show you a workflow from start to finish in a way that I would usually actually do it in my real job so we've got a previous bunch of videos on content creation so these cover more in depth and slower on the process of creating a family and this one will just show you how I create a family from start to finish so we're going to look at creating a family all the way from template to what I would call a complete family for use the family we're looking at today is going to be a uni straphanger that is going to need to be a parametric family so it needs to adjust to different sizes for different scenarios and it has a little bit of detail in it some nested components so it gives me the chance to show you some techniques that you may not be aware of so some techniques that we'll cover is how to use online based family happen s3d families into a family so in this case the uni strut hanger itself will be a nested component will also nest and profile into the uni struts so we'll show you how you can do that using a profile family we're also going to look at parametric constraints and how you can host geometry to work planes and then we also look at just how to establish a basic formula and establish constraints in your family as well how to add object styles and also how to control the detail level and the visibility of your family so all really important techniques to create a complete family but without favourably let's jump in and start the family so essentially the family we're aiming for is gonna be a little bit like this so you've got a uni shirt hanger in this case we use it to support ducks and the things like that on the site and then they fix this to the slab so we're gonna have a fixing height at the top and then i suspended the suspension height so essentially you can change the fixing height and you can also change the suspension height as well so it's gonna be quite a complicated family to set up for a basic user so hopefully this will give you an insight into how I develop content and how you might be able to as well but anyway let's close this and actually get started with a fresh family no tricks so essentially we're going to be using some reference so I'm going to be using this profile dimension as a reference I'm gonna admit little details like this and the teeth Irv's but I'm going to at least use this profile as a starting point and essentially what we're going to model is the Uni strut and the threads that hold these elements up so I'm just gonna make a new family so under family new and I'm just going to go and find a template in this case I'm going to use a generic model line based template because I want this to be a family where the user picks two points and that generates a uni strut in width so we'll make a line based family by default this family gives you essentially a line that the family will follow so I'll show you how this works partway into creating this but the first thing I'm going to do is actually establish my uni struck profile so this is another family again so we're gonna make a new family sorry new family and we're gonna use a profile template as well so we're gonna have two families open at the same time so I'll get my profile and we're just going to draw this uni struck profile so it's 41 mil by 41 mil I'm just gonna start centrically and then move it over after and I'm just going to draw 41 real by 41 mil and in the screenshot the lip of the Uni strut is about I'll say that's about 10 millimeters maybe let's say it's seven and a half so it's two and a half millimeters wide so I'll just draw a aquila say ten likewise we'll go down and across ten and then we want to apply our radius to some of these corners so let's just surprise apply our radius of let's say two-and-a-half millimeters and I'm using this tangent arc tool or fill it arc tool sorry which can be really handy for really quickly drawing tangent ox what I'm not do then is just mirror these so I'll just marry this one upon its center point what I might do is just mirror and then move it across so I'm gonna mirror it upon this snap point then like a copy and move that over two and a half and delete the original use my trim tool like this let's each I'm drawing the outside face off the of the lip at the moment so I'll go two and a half and what am i doing down is just take these elements mirror them on the center form of the profile and that's pretty much good to go and then all we need to do is get our pick line tool and offset this by two-and-a-half millimeters and I'll tab select to get all the lines in my profile change my offset to zero and draw a standard line and there we go that's how profile and the last thing I'll do is remove my profile over so that it's centered on the top and center and what I'll do is just save this what I might do is just go to visibility graphics annotation categories and turn off the line of fashion categories that way if your user sees this thumbnail on the library they'll just see the Guinea struck profile so I'm just gonna do a save as I must purge first just to make the family as small and light as possible to save as family and typically four components I'll main them a particular way so I'll just save this under my family master class and typically four components I like to save them in a special folder so my naming convention is typically my acronym prf for profile and then what it is so I can say he nistro then i use dashes for my small break and data i'm not to do 41 by 41 and do a say about what i can do with this is load this into my family for my unity truck I'm going to use this profile in the channel that forms the in strokes so to draw this Unni stratum you use a sweep so I'm going to use my sketch path tool and do a pick one and I'm just going to pick line on this reference client then I'm gonna use my align tool and I'm just going to get that node on the end of the line in order to constrain the edge of this element so these two reference planes that my line based family is constrained from once I finish my path I can either sketch my path or I can load it I know you see this uni strut profiles appeared in our model so essentially this lets us use this profile without having to draw it and because we hosted it on its top and center that's where it will be placed what the moment a uni strut is at the wrong height so I want this to be the level that I place my family up so what I'm going to do is create a new reference plan using our peak or under create reference plane and this will be in my mounting height so what I can do with this now that I've made it is I can edit its work plane to be this height instead so if I go to edit work playing pick up line and pick this reference plan just Leonel now my sweep is posted to this level instead and when this change is higher the Uni strut will move up and down with it so that's how we can sort of set up a parametric relationship a very simple one of that just a hosted relationship really what I'm going to do now is a silent associate a parameter so I'm going to draw a dimension and to the level and we'll select this and add a parameter and I'm gonna call this support heart I'm going to make this an instance base parameter so that every placement of this family can be a unique value it's not locked down by the type of the family now okay that's my support heart and then I can go and change this just as its default condition to say 2700 actually I'll do 20 20 100 there we go so now you can see that that moves the family around when the reference height is changed so essentially what we can do now is we'll set up one other reference plan for our soffit height or the top of the Uni straphanger I'm just going to move this up 600 millimeters and to mention this back down as well and I want to make this let's call this fixing higher you could use shared parameters here if you wanted to I'm just using project or family parameters in this case and what you could do is if we wanted to find out what this is note that this is a consequence of two other dimensions so we don't want to associate a parameter to this because essentially this is just the fixing height minus the support height so that's our drop height or whatever you want to call it but in this case we can use a formula to control just if we need it to be reported out of the family as a shared parameter for a tag for example or controlled by dynamo so what I'll do here is call this drop height and I'll make a new length parameter as an instance and I'll drop this with a formula so I'll make this the fixing height minus the support height and because it's driven by two other parameters it becomes locked so this is purely at the mercy of two other parameters as these change note that our formula is controlling this this value instead so that's a very basic example of a formula while I'm here I might just create one type called typical and the reason I'm calling this typical is because all these parameters are instance based so it doesn't really matter what size the Uni strut is in this case it's just a type so we're calling it typical because they're all gonna be the same I'll just purge I find I've purged a lot when I'm building families it doesn't really matter when you do it you could do it right at the end so what am i doing now while I'm still here is change these reference plans so I'm going to make this the top of my family and I'll just make this a weak reference plan at the moment okay so what we need now is our hangers so we're going to constrain them is just a little bit in from the edge of our family let's say we want to inset these maybe 25 millimeters so I'll make a reference plan and I'll just mirror this reference plane up on this line and I'll just make these not a reference they're just there to control the position and five choppers and I'll just make a dimension here and here what you can actually do when you create a parameter is you can select more than one dimension to associate it to so I can make a new prouder and just call it drop it insert this one I will make type based because we want that intercept to be consistent it's always the same let's make it 15 millimeters and there you go and now you can see that this parameter is locked down by the type properties instead you can also lock it if you want just by putting a number into the formula so now this is always 50 the user can't even change it in the type properties in the project so there we go what we might do now is focus on this strut component that's meant to be going here it's important to note as well that we can't actually see our channel anymore that's good that's above the viewer our view currently if you do need to see it temporarily while you're working you can actually select the floorplan and change its view range notice this will have no impact on your family in the project it's just in your working environment if you need to see these elements if they're tuned for too hot too low or too high outside the view range so I can say my B range is 2100 after 2700 and there's my channel now I can see it again what I might do is just save this family something I'm working on it and I don't want to lose it because occasionally programs can crash so in this case I'll just call this Ozzie BIM guru gen4 generic model and I'll just call this ministro hangout type one I like to usually set type 1 type 2 that way if you end up with variations upon the family there's still a way to identify the difference between them okay so let's start making our dropper now so I'm just gonna make a new family again and I'll make this a generic model and we're basically going to build this as what I like to call a component which is a piece of a family that you can load into another family but it doesn't become a part of the project it's just part of the family and the thing that's pivotal to this is this box called shared so if this is ticked off the next level you load this family to is essentially the end of the line for that family so if this dropper is going to be loaded into the unis truck family when that uni struck family's loaded into the project the project will see the dropper as geometry it won't actually give it its own nested family in the project level which is ideal because we're really just building the unis strap for control in this case so I'm not the instructor droplet you'll note till I've turned on the work plane based property here so I'll show you why I've done that in a second but I usually recommend turning this on for a majority of families so for this family I'm gonna go on to front view I shall go yeah front view first so I'm gonna make this the level of my new nice truck so I know that my Unni strap is 41 millimeters higher so I'm just going to put a dimension on here at 41 and I'm just gonna lock that and this is really just a guide for my family likewise I'll make a parameter or a reference plane for the top or my slab and I'll dimension that off the top of the innie strut and I'll just call this height and make it an instance base parameter so now what we want to do is draw some components for our uni strap dropper so typically these elements will typically have a plate above and below the Uni strut they're all different of course they're not always the same but I'm going to do this scenario and then a bolt a bolted thread that runs through the Uni strut up to the top of the slab where it's typically either bolted Khem set or fixed to the slab somehow or it's clipped onto a beam but essentially what I'll focus on in this case is just this fixing first and it's all hosted around this reference plane really so what I'm going to do is go to floor plan and I'm going to draw an extrusion and I'm just going to make it 41 by 41 let's make it the same width and depth of the instruc what I'll do is just turn this out and I'm just going to move this over so that it's always centered on these two origin reference planes that way when I place it it's all centric so I'll go to front view so currently this is posted to this reference plan I can actually host this to another reference plane if I want I can say post here instead and note that your extrusions always have a start and an end value so what I can do is say it starts at 0 and finishes at -10 and now you can see that this is instead still hosted to this reference plane but now it's being down set instead likewise I can put one on top by picking the plane and picking this reference plane and setting this to 0 and 10 or 0 and 5 depending what thickness you want your plate to be you can see you can work both ways and respect to the reference plane as well in this case I'll just do two square plates and I'll just do one at the top as well let's just do it bolted connection like a CEM set at the top and we'll do minus 5 for this one and then as this reference plane moves so will all these elements that are associated to them so if this moves down my bolt moves down with it and I don't need to do any constraining it's just based on reference planned relationships let's add some bolts as well so I'll go to create extrusion and note you can also change your work plan here when you're drawing as well and pick a we're playing at this point for now I'll just keep drawing as I was before I'm just gonna use a polygon with eight sides for a bolt and I'll just make it ten mil in radius so if I go to front view you can see now we've been drawing off this reference plane now I want to be 5 mil up and then 10 mil up so that I start on top of my plate and finish 5 mil above that again likewise I'll re host my work plane to the bottom and then do minus 5 minus 5 minus 10 so it's all about relativity to the work plane I can also do one for my top connection with a pic line up here and there we go so now we have bolts on all of our plates as well so now we'll add the threads so it's important to note that I'm gonna make this a top post at uni strap so I'm gonna do a two and a half mil reference plane here and this is so I can host my thread and make it look like it actually stops when it meets the Uni stroke so I'm gonna make a thread and I'm just gonna make this a probably a let's do like a seven and a half mil thread 3.75 diameter even like that a little bit bigger sorry a 5 5 mile radius okay so now you can see currently we're hosted 2 here so what I might do is use my line tool tab selects and align my thread here and here and while I'm still in this view all you co for copy do an offset of zero and then I'll rehearsed another part of the thread to here so because I'm constrained to this reference plan I can set the start at 10 mil but I'll need to constrain at the top so what I'll do is just copy down by 10 mil set it to not a reference and just dimension and lock this at $10 then I'll constrain my thread up here so that's pretty much the thread created so that's what we've made right there and this means we can now place two of these really easily in our model so I'm just going to purge and what I'll do really quickly is just set up an object style for this thread that will be associated at the next level so what I'll do is just call this thread you could call that uni strut and make it a part of the next level of the family it just depends on how you want to control the visibility of these elements and your family what I'll do is just also associate a material parameter and I'll just call this material and make it instance based that way I can set it at the next level of my family when I nest this within my units drop essentially that's all we need to do and I'll just call this typical so now we should have a parametric family or parametric struct that we can nest in to our uni struck family so I'll do a save as save this this thread and I'll just call this I'll put a little dash C because it's been fun it that's usually my standard that I use so people can tell when it's a component family or a project family not just Paul this uni Strasberg type one I'll just light this into my uni strap family and notice because I've used a word plane based family setting I can place on a face or a web plane and I can pick my web plane very easily so note that we don't have our support level available as a workplan at the moment when we look at that list that's this we haven't given it a name so let's just give it a name let's call it support support level what I can do now is take my two threads edit that work plan and I can pick support level from my list now and now you can see that they've become hosted to that level and because I've based my family from this level you can see that this is how it will situate itself around the Uni stroke if I go to floorplan I can use my align tool and I can align my family based on its center planes likewise I can align this one and this one and what we should end up with is a pretty smart looking family that has a detailed uni strap that's still parametric and connected to all these elements but the one thing we haven't connected here is that these threads are currently flexible butterman remember that we created a parameter for the drop light based on this formula so you can actually nest this into the height of the Uni straw so even though it's driven by a formula you can use that formula to drive other elements and now you'll see that this remains parametric so when we raise or drop a uni strap you'll see that our components also follow this height as well so really smart and what I can also do is now I can take these two struts and nest a material parameter in here let's just nest an instance based actually type based material in this case because we're in the Uni strata itself and I'll just also nest that to the channel as well note that because we're working in same category a family thread object style has come through to this level of the family and will also reach the project I might also just make one called channel and channel I'll use my uni structural now these two elements I don't want to see them in floorplan I don't really want to see my uni struck channel as well because it's too detailed so what I'm going to do is go to the visibility graphic overrides of these elements and I'm going to tell it not to show up in floor plan or RCP what am I also do is say that I only want to see my threads when I'm on fine detail because they're quite detailed elements note that this channel is also quite detailed so maybe I want a simpler version than when I'm in fine detail view so when I'm not in fine detail view let's just say we want to see a box so what I'll do is say that in course and let's say in course we don't see this detail in medium we do that we don't see the threads so what I'll do now is just model a new extrusion and I'll model it at support level I'll constrain it to either end and then I'll just set two lines that are non constrained for the edges there's one and I'll just trim these lines up and I'll just give it a negative offset of 41 millimeters that way it's always sitting 41 millimeters below so obviously we have geometry and on top of geometry what I'll do is to say this doesn't show in planar RCP but it only shows on coarse detail so we only ever see one or the other of the representation I'll set up material and also it's object style as well a good tool when you're editing families if you want to see how your family is going to look at various levels of detail is down here so this is your preview visibility so let's just turn on preview visibility so now we can see that we're medium and all we see is a uni strut channel we don't see the droppers and we don't see the coarse representation let's go to course now we see the really simple representation and it's fine we see everything so we see the channel and we see the droppers mm-hmm excuse me and we don't see that coarse representation of the channel okay you can control the level of detail and element filigree that you see in your model anyway the next thing we'll do now is that at the moment we can't see our channel in floorplan so what we need to do is add some annotation lines so I'm just going to go and draw some annotation lines note the annotation lines can be drawn at a level so I can still say that they occur at support level so that the 2d hierarchy of these elements is still understood when it finds to any families that it meets I'll just make this the uniess truck channel object style so the channel and I'll just make them not a reference note I'm doing this all before I even draw so I'm just gonna draw these and use my line tool to lock these two and all will see in floor plan or RCP for this family now is four lines so we're already showing a lot less detail which will speed up our floor plan and make this family a lot faster to see especially when you have a lot of them holding all your ducks up so just keep in mind that sometimes it's better to be 3d representation in 2d views you could do the same in elevation in this case I want so the last thing we'll need to do now is add an invisible mind because if we have this family placed in our model but there's no geometry underneath it if this is above our view range we won't see those 2d lines but if we add a invisible model line that's cut through the family will think it's been cut and it will show you the 2d lines I'm not just or show what I mean so if I just draw an invisible line and make it not a reference this all doesn't matter because it's invisible I might just draw it and I'll host it at the top of the family all the way down to the reference level that way the family is always cut at some level because 3d families will show that 3d elements as long as they're cut in some form that means when we're in floorplan we'll see how uni struts above us in for phone which is usually ideal because you'll be seeing them on the duct runs for example which you also want to see in floorplan above so it pretty much almost done with our family at this point hopefully it's been useful seeing some of the techniques I've used along the way and I'll show the family in practice what I might do here is just add a material to the actual view nice truck family itself so that it renders okay so what I might just do is look for a galvanized steel from the Autodesk material library I'm just going to search for galv I believe there's some galvanized steel in the default library the material browser can be a little bit slow sometimes there we go galvanized steel so I'm just gonna add this to my to my family and I will associate that to my material there we go so now we have a material associated to our elements cool I also make sure that my family is shared so that when it's in the project or it's nested into something else it also reaches the project is a nested family and that way you can still target and schedule it even if it's nested into another family I'll do another purge and we'll just add some basic information about our family as well so you can add a tight image so that if you schedule it you can have an image for it as well in my case I'll just add one of these images keep in mind this should come off the server path so that everyone else has access to this image one they load the family but I'll just pick one of these one of these images cool great it's ideally ideal to make it a small image as well and we'll just call this US for you nice trap for our code model if you know who manufacturer is it great what I usually do with these if I don't is I lock in a generic manufacturer so it forces the user to open the family and actually think about it cool you can also add a URL if you know a website to link this to so we could say any stroke Australia I could link this URL then when you're in the project you will have a hyperlink able URL so I'll just copy that it looks like it's not committing to my keyboard there we go I'll just do it manually WWWE that's been tricky today cool and if you want a description you could call it say you nistro 41 about 41 millimeters if you know an assembly code for it feel free to add it and if you know it cost you can do that as well but in this case we don't need to do either note that cost is a tricky parameter to work with because it's tight based so if your cost is based on a formula so the length times something else and it's not a type parameter you can't really connect it to an intelligent cost which is a bit of a shame but essentially that's all we need to do so if we okay that I'll show you how this family works in the project so we'll save and we'll just open a new project just an architectural template and let's just have a look at how it behaves so it's a line based family so it immediately prompts us to place it on a work plan because it's a line based family and we'll basically be able to click twice and it will generate a uni stroke so if i zoom in we can see those for symbolic lines that we use to represent the family in floorplan and I'll see P essentially at this point you can just change it any way you want so that's the power of line based family sometimes they're great let's just jump into 3d and have a look at it so we're only in course detail sorry we're in medium detail at the moment so we can only see the Uni strut itself let's go to course now we see the box fine and now we see all the detail so let's say that I need to make this 3000 above the floor for fixing all I have to do is adjust my parameter and you'll see that those struts change in height because they're controlled by the drop height which is to connect it to the formula likewise I can also change my support height and it all recalculates so a really smart easy little example of some family techniques on display there the last thing I'll show you is those object styles we set up so object Styles allow you to have more control over the visibility of your elements so let's say that in 3d we don't want to see our threads but we want to be on fine detail so I can go and turnoff thread and my threads are turned off or maybe I want to change their color they want to make them gray and I want to make my uni straight channels blue because I'm doing some coordination I can just quickly override this to subcategories and there you go you can see we have a lot more control over the way that our family looks and because we've made this family instance-based it's important to note you can independently change the properties and they won't impact one another their independence also in floorplan let's say that we're seeing those uni struts and we don't want to see them coming up with solid lines the great thing about object Styles you can really quickly go and change the graphics of an element just in that particular view so we can say that our uni struts are always dashed because they're above if I scale small enough you can see now our uni straight object styles being overridden so really cool right so a lot of little techniques on display there just to save you a bit of a bit of hassle in establishing some things like this that you know can really help enhance the quality of your model but also make the families easier to use for you for your users essentially effective families need to be easy to use but they also need to achieve the job that they're required to do so that's why I've added a lot of controls and a lot of smarts into the family and also detailed level controls so that they work at different levels of detail review during the design process that helps but hopefully I'll do some more of these at later dates not just for families but also for design and modeling workflows as well that's all for today if you've got any feedback or comments or just recommendations for future master classes I can conduct feel free to let me know I make videos about two to three times a week and so I try to upload quite frequently so if you're not already filling in subscribing feel free to do so and hopefully I'll see you in the next video thanks you

Channel: Aussie BIM Guru

Views: 28,507

Rating: 4.9406528 out of 5

Keywords: aussie, bim, guru, cad, revit, dynamo, computational, tutorial, demonstration, how to, educational, family, creation, content, development, geometry, constraint, reference, plane, line, 3D, master class, unistrut, parametric

Id: IYHHrnDzMFE

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019