Get rid of the Baggage!

Revit Family Man has been revamped and is now far quicker.
We are slowly upgrading as we go. Be sure to refresh your browsers.


A new Family of the week has also been added for download!

Be sure to check it out!

Enjoy!

Family of the week!

Revit Family Man has now got a "Family Of the week"

We will be posting some really cool families here, along with images. All parameters used, will be supplied with a detailed description.

Feel free to download them, vote on them, leave comments and if you like your details.

To get the concept going, we possibly will post a whole lot, so be sure to keep a watchful eye.

There is a collection of over 3gigs, (not all cool families), but we expect to get a whole lot up there.

Enjoy!

Go Big...or go home!

Revit Family Man is going BIG!!

Besides a number of other pressing opportunities, I am beginning to find that the hosting of this Blog at blogspot is rather limiting and frustrating. The upload times are just massive.

I have so much that I could share (family downloads, images, tutorials, help etc) and no where to put it all. So we went BIG and registered the domain name www.revitfamilyman.com and signed up for some seriously PHAT server space.

Please note: For now this will not affect this Blogs URL until the site is complete and we do the move across.
Thanks to all those that do read this Blog for all the support. In such a short period we have had over 5000 hits, with an average of over 55 per day.

The infant site is alive and waiting to grow. I Had to do a crash course in web and FTP publishing so don’t knock the programmer if things don’t work properly yet.
Although still in its infancy, you are more than welcome to go check it out. Over the next few weeks we will be completing all the services, so be sure to keep a lookout.

Mr Sun ... Shine your light on me.

I bet you have tried to print a shaded view of lets say floor layouts/patterns, and struggled endlessly with trying to match the pantone colours. It just doesn't come together.
When turning to "shaded with edges", Revit (and most 3D apps) makes use of default sun light that shines down on your model, giving it a slight edge and depth. (Mr. Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, shine your light on me….jingle…..daughter + Barney all day long)

To get an accurate portrayal of the real pantone colour rather select a solid surface pattern for your material. The surface pattern will show in a normal hidden line view.
In the views you don’t require the surface colour to be visible for floors, switch it off in visibility graphics.

Subcategorize

More often than not, the visibility issues you are experiencing in your project are closely related to the fact that your family components are not properly categorized.

Both model objects and lines make use of “Object styles”, which is setup by default as a subcategory of the family category in every family template.

This means, the elements of any family can be broken down into layers as you would be more familiar with. E.g.: A Door Family is broken into Panel, Glass, Opening, Frame/Mullion etc. You can customize these defaults as well as add your own line styles. One I like to add in a door family is “Lintols Over” and assign it a dashed line type.

Assigning object styles subcategories, enables the control of visibility of certain elements in the project via the Visibility Graphics tool. For example, for large scales one can simply switch door panels and frames off. In a smaller scale just switch them on again. There are always instances where the visibility of objects need to differ from view to view.

Family templates such as doors and windows have a number of these subcategories set up by default. When it comes to the likes of specialty equipment, Mechanical equipment, Generic model family templates, the need to create subcategories to control visibility graphics, is far greater. You will find only one subcategory to these templates.

Picture this scenario. You have a number of Mechanical families in a project. One of them being Aircon’ units. You have to supply the contractor a plan of just A/C layout details. If you switch Mechanical Equipment off in the view, all ME is turned off including your A/C. The reason is the A/C family components are not placed into subcategories.

Subcategories can be set up in the project, however these custom subcategories cannot be assigned to a family component whilst in the project.
In order for the visibility of subcategories to work the subcategories have to be created in the family using the family editor.