Control visibility of masking region linework in Revit

While creating a custom office furniture family set for a client a while back, I had the need to control the appearance of boundary lines in a Revit masking region.

On the surface, it seemed like something pretty easy to do. While in Sketch Mode for the masking region, you can select the boundary line you want to paramaterize to control its visibility and add a Yes/No field to it. You can check out the accompanying image to see how I attempted this. Seems like it would do the trick, right?

The problem is that it just flat doesn’t work. For some reason, the Visibility parameter doesn’t apply to masking region boundaries. I fought with the masking region a bit before eventually, I figured out a pretty easy work around. It was one of those things I figured out while deep in the middle of a family creation project that saved the day, but I didn’t take the time to put together a blog post or video to share it with my fellow Reviteers.

Well, Jose over at Andekan has created a great (while lengthy) video showing the problem and the work around. Check it out, after this brief description of the solution. Here’s the trick:

You can’t control the visibility of a Revit masking region boundary with a parameter.

Instead, change the linework of the boundary lines that you need to control to ‘Invisible’. Now they will never be seen. Exit sketch mode for the masking region.

Next, draw new Symbolic Lines over the top of them. Guess what? Symbolic Lines CAN have a parameter that controls their visibility!

You should be able to take it from there. If you want to see a great step by step, check out the video from Andekan. Also, be sure to check out their high quality custom Revit families. These guys do a great job of creating powerful and parametric Revit content.

Revit Families – Endless combinations with nested families and the Family Type parameter

Have you ever created a Revit family that had several nested families in it that you wanted a simple drop down menu to give you the chance to choose which nested family you wanted? Well, here’s a brilliant method for creating powerful nested families that seems to be difficult to find solid documentation on. I’d like to thank Bob for reminding me about this easy to use yet dynamic technique for controlling the visibility of nested families.

Here’s the scenario:

Let’s say you have a family (we’ll refer to this as the parent family) that contains several nested families that are possible options within it. For example, you might have a door family that consists of the frame and the opening, but that has several panel families nested into it. One panel might be a typical flush door panel, another is a panel with glass, another is a panel with louvers, etc.

We want to make it easy for users to insert the door family, then choose the type of panel they want. Now the way I’ve seen this documented the most often is to use the Visibility control tied to a Yes/No parameter that controls whether Panel 1 is visible or not, Panel 2 , Panel 3, etc.

This method works ok, but has some potential problems. You end up inserting all the families into the parent family, then having to align and constrain each one, then you have to set up a bunch of Types in the family that in turn have those Visibility Yes/No parameters set correctly. Still following me? One of the problems we’ve run into is that the user now has to create their own types, or manually run through those parameters and make sure that the panel that they wanted is turned on and all the others are off. If they make a mistake, it’s possible that they have more than one panel turned on and all sorts of craziness can ensue.

Also, if you have quite a few nested family options, this list of parameters can get to be pretty unwieldy and difficult to set correctly.

What would be great is to simply have a dropdown parameter in Element Properties that shows all the nested family options and just lets you pick it, having it swap out the appropriate nested family. Well, with the technique we’ll show here, you can do exactly that.

The Solution – Create a Family Type parameter and use it to drive your family Label

After you’ve created your parent family, load up all the nested families that represent the options you want to have available. It’s important that these families be as identical as possible. They won’t be completely identical, of course, but you should create them from each other, keeping the reference lines in the same place to ensure that when one family gets swapped out for the other, things don’t jump around on you and constraints don’t break.

The next step is to create a new Parameter that is configured as a “Family Type” parameter.

Here I’ve named it “Door Panel Type”. You then need to choose which Category of families you want to be available to that Parameter. We’ve created our panels as Generic Models, so I choose this category.

Note that all families that are assigned to that category will be shown in the drop down for that parameter, so make sure you aren’t cramming too much into one family. For instance, if I also had a bunch of families nested in that represented door hardware – knobs, pulls, etc. and they were assigned to the Generic Model category, our drop down for the panels is going to be really confusing, because you’ll see families for both panels and hardware.

Now here comes the little trick that brings it all together: insert one nested family and position it correctly.

You don’t need to insert all of the nested families and go through the trouble of aligning them and constraining them. All the nested families have to be loaded into the main family, but not inserted. Now select the nested family and go to its Element Properties. At the bottom you’ll see Label. Set this value to use the parameter you created earlier (the Family Type parameter) so that this family instance will be driven by it.

That’s all there is to it! Now, when you change the parameter for Family Type, it will swap out this instance with the appropriate family. Brilliant!

In the example at the top of this post, we’ve got two instances of a nested door family that allows endless combinations. Each side of the door can have unlimited family options. This door has 7 panels for each door, giving us a LOT of possibilities.

Unable to Edit a Revit Family

Have you ever been working with a Revit file that has been upgraded from a previous version? If so, you may have noticed that you may not be able to edit any of the families that are defined in that project.

I’ve run into this issue quite a bit, especially considering that we use the Autodesk Official Training Courseware (AOTC) to teach our Revit Architecture Essentials classes. If you’ve ever opened any of the project files included with this course, you may have noticed that none of the families are editable. The exact reason why has always been a bit of a mystery.

The fact that some families are impossible to edit has brought up two great questions:

1. Why are these families not editable in the first place (and is it possible that my families may not be able to be edited in the future?)
2. This is great! How can I ‘lock Revit families’ to prevent other people from editing them?

We always had a hunch that it had something to do with the fact that the projects had been upgraded from older Revit projects, though we weren’t sure exactly why that would be the case. It’s evident that many of the files in the Revit AOTC are quite old, perhaps being originally created 4 or 5 years ago. I’ve also run across files from clients that are several years old and they have the same issue. I’ve seen several threads up on AUGI and RevitCity asking the same thing, but hadn’t seen a satisfactory answer.  So, I posed the question directly to product support at Autodesk. It clears it up…well, sort of!

Here’s a snippet from the email I received:

The Edit Family option was not always available in Revit. If you have a family which was created in a version of Revit prior to the Edit Family option, then that option won’t be available when the family is loaded into a project.

This doesn’t mean you can’t update the family you just have to use a different method. Find the family in the Project Browser. Right click on it and select Reload.

So, I understand that older versions of Revit didn’t have the ‘Edit Family’ button. I don’t exactly understand why those legacy families can’t be edited now, though, since their information is clearly stored in the project, and we do have the ‘Edit Family’ option now, but, straight from the Factory, that’s how it works.

Now, if you have the original family saved somewhere, as a seperate RFA family, you can use that Reload trick, which lets you select the seperate family file and load that definition into the project. Once you’ve done that, you’ll notice that the ‘Edit Family’ button is now available. Sweet!

For old projects with custom families where you don’t still have access to the RFA files, sounds like you’re out of luck. There’s no way to ‘break out’ these family definitions from your project to make RFA files out of them. For a normal family, you don’t need the RFA file. If you ever want to create a seperate RFA with that family definition, you just hit the ‘Edit Family’ button, then Save to a new file. This just isn’t available with these old legacy files. Again, I don’t exactly understand why that’s the case, but it seems pretty set in stone. If anyone has any tricks that you’ve figured out to get around this, by all means, post a comment! I’d love to share the solution, if there is one. I’ve sure got a few of these old projects sitting around that I’ve love to be able edit the families for.

Now, getting back to question number 2: Is it possible to lock a Revit family so that other people can’t mess with it? No good news on that count, either.  So, if you create your custom family with an old version of Revit (probably pre Revit 5), and save that into an old project, then upgrade it to Revit 2009 or Revit 2010, that family will be ‘protected’, due to the reasons mentioned above. Unfortunately, that idea really doesn’t fly, and if you are creating families with more recent versions, they will be open to anyone you give the RVT project to.

Autodesk has had many requests to come up with a way to protect custom Revit families (my own request included), so this might be functionality we see in the future.

You can use the following link to submit feedback and feature requests to the Autodesk Development group:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=1109794

Till then, share and share alike, I guess!

Thanks to Lance at Autodesk for the above clarification.

Happy Reviting.

Family Creation Metadata Style Guide

Creating detailed and accurate Revit families can be a daunting task. The modeling of the elements is only part of the task. Creating parameters and populating them correctly is critical to creating families that will stand the test of time and be as useful as possible in a project.

If you’ve downloaded free Revit content from sites like RevitCity, BIMWorld, AUGI, etc. you’ve seen some great stuff, and probably quite a bit that is not so great. Even some of the stuff that is truly great can be a bit difficult to use, since it’s made by lots of different authors following all sorts of different methods, standards, and naming conventions.

Manufacturers are jumping into the BIM game as well, creating Revit based content of their lighting fixtures, plumbing fixtures, pumps, doors, windows, you name it. It seems that all of them are following different standards as well, making the use of this content a bit ‘hit-or-miss’.

To mitigate these issues, Autodesk is really making a push to get all such content consolidated into one ‘digital warehouse’ (oops, did Google already copyright that one?) known as Autodesk Seek. And to make sure that all the content builders are creating content in a standardized way, a team at Autodesk, consisting of Paul Busby, Ryan Nutbrown, (and possibly others) has put together an incredibly detailed guide for establishing metadata for manufacturers’ families. The good news is that this guide can be used by anyone — yes, even you! In it you will find 73 packed pages filled all sorts of best practices for naming conventions, necessary fields or parameters to be included in the Seek site, and generally, just good things to do to make your families as standardized and usable as possible.

Check it out! If everyone followed these ideals for Revit families, the BIM world would be a better place!

http://seek.autodesk.com/AutodeskSeekMetadataStyleGuide.pdf