Forums >> Revit Building >> Technical Support >> Setting up "office standard families"

AllenBall

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Joined: Sun, Feb 17, 2008
197 Posts

I work for a large Commerical Frim in No. Little Rock, AR. We are in the process of switching the last of the CAD guys over to REVIT. This is turning out to be a big challenge for some of them. Me and the other BIM manager have set up all our office templates and standards. But now we are to the point of making some "office standard" families.

 I have been put in charge of this task, and i know it is somethign that will not happen over night. I am wanting to know how other offices have been handling this task. i would like to create some advanced families. For the less experienced guys so that if they wanted to do a typical millwork section it would note it and dimension it all for them. i understand how all the parameters and everything works inside the families, but i think my main question is how much is to much? Should i worry about bogging these families down with to much info and options? I am hopping to try and make it easy as i can so if one guy wanted to add a view panel to his door, he could just trun on the view panel parameter and it be there noted and placed in out office stadard. and ideas, suggestions, past experinces, or links to information on this topic would be helpful. reply on here or email me if you need to (ball@taggarch.com)

Allen Ball

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J. Allen Ball

Revit Architecture 2010 Certified Professional

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WWHub

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Joined: Tue, May 16, 2006
13079 Posts

We are an office of 40+.  We currently have 3 people who are good family builders and we will be training a few others this week.  We are going to train these other builders on how to make simple 2D families and annotative families.  We really do not want them dealing with parametric or complicated 3D families but we know that in order to be productive, we need a few other family builders.  We also don't want users building 3D familieswhere 2D is all that is required.

Office standards are hard to establish and maintain but we are working on that.  This is one reason why we are having this training.  We want our users to make good decesions following some simple guidlines.  We will not give them write access to the library.  That will be restricted to a few that will review families and approve or modify them before they go into the library.

Our biggest concerns at this time are naming conventions for families, sub-categories, parameters, materials, reference plane.

For major items likes doors, we believe you don't want one family does all.  Building a family like that is too complicated for most users to build or modify so we have a few major families.  As an example, for HM doors, we have solid panel doors, doors with lites, doors with sidelite then solid double doors, double doors with lites. 

All of these doors have been built to our standards and have our parameters in so they will schedule correctly. If a project demands something special, we will insist that the project team uses something close and gives it a new type name so that one of our top builders can modify a family and it can be sustituted.

We also name all approved families with our office initials at the beginning so that they are easily identified.

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AllenBall

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Joined: Sun, Feb 17, 2008
197 Posts

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J. Allen Ball

Revit Architecture 2010 Certified Professional

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AllenBall

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Joined: Sun, Feb 17, 2008
197 Posts

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J. Allen Ball

Revit Architecture 2010 Certified Professional

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WWHub

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Joined: Tue, May 16, 2006
13079 Posts

Not that I know of.

I really don't like family hosted details.  I think they take up too much space and are hard to work with.  In detail views, I would rather turn off the model element, like a window, and add the detail component.

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MARS1276

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Joined: Thu, Jan 24, 2008
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I will agree with WWHub.  I was in charge of creating a lot of families for our own CAD-to-Revit conversion.  At first I started making our typical doors.  I tried to create a nested family of doors to show different panels within each frame.  I got this idea from a training tip online.  What I found out was that I had wasted a WHOLE bunch of time trying to get each panel to work, parameters for each panel to show the correct material, and then I don't recall being able to schedule them all.

I would suggest keeping it simple.  If you want, create a detail component that you can place in a section of a window or door that will show all of the detail (with notations), or better yet, just do what we do; create a sheet just for window and door details.  Sometimes of course you may not need an entire sheet, but to elaborate, you could create a project with nothing but window and door details drawn as drafting views.  Then when you are in a project, you could import each view for what you need individually.

 I have found in the past that WWHub has some great advice.

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AllenBall

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Joined: Sun, Feb 17, 2008
197 Posts

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J. Allen Ball

Revit Architecture 2010 Certified Professional

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Line weights reverting to standard

9

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4

"ADA Clearances" in families

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How to make a "Model in-place" a "Family"

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changing the "family" and "type" names

3