Autodesk Revit Families: A Step-by-Step Introduction

The article is a tutorial explaining the steps necessary to make new families. It delineates the basic hierarchies and nomenclature used to classify the different elements in a revit model. Using this article and the practice of making our own families was a great way to begin to understand the program better. It was very helpful to have a guideline we could rely on when things got a bit confusing on our own experimentation with the program.

It was a bit frustrating at times to understand the different levels of families, when they are nested to each other, and how they are linked in terms of changing one to automatically change the other. It was also confusing at times when a parametrically controlled family was downloaded, to understand what its existing constrains were to be able to edit and manipulate the model the way we wanted to.

Lastly, the process of creating a family is really great because it makes one think in variables and in geometrical relationships, but it is at times very difficult to understand what kind of constrains and variables need to be set to generate the form one wants. I also noticed that editing is not as easy as when in conceptual mass form. With parametrically controlled editing, it is better to understand initially what the user wants to generate, to have a strategy to go about it, so that the model remains cleaned and “editable.” Otherwise it is really hard to change and retrace the steps later as to what was constrained, what should be blended or cut or joined, etc, etc. Overall it was a very tough exercise, but it was very clear that there are huge benefits to this way of modeling, and the tutorial was really helpful in explaining the logic behind the process of creating families in Revit. It will just take time to really get used to it.