From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Understanding wall families - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Understanding wall families

- [Instructor] The subject of all the videos in this chapter is going to be walls, so I thought it would be good for us to take a high level look at walls before we start in any specific topic. So, let's start with a reminder of families in general and how they fit into the overall Revit hierarchy. So remember at the top of the hierarchy, we have categories. Categories are things like walls and doors and floors and roofs. Now, categories can either be component categories or system categories, in other words, the families within those categories can either be a loadable component family, which means that you can create it externally to a project in an environment called the family editor, you can edit it, you can completely customize it, you can build your own, and they must be loaded into projects in order to be used. Contrast that to system families which are already built in, so all the system families that we have are already there, they're part of every project, we cannot edit them directly. So that's the big difference. Component loadable families can be edited, system families cannot. Now when I say they can't be edited, we're really just talking at the family level. At the type level, we can always edit. So every kind of family can have user customizable types, and we frequently do a lot of that where we do edit type, duplicate, and we make a custom type, and we can do that both for component categories like doors and fixtures and furnishings, and we can do that for system categories like walls and roofs and floors. So walls are system families. So again, this means that we can't edit the wall families, but we can edit the wall type. So when you talk about different kinds of walls like stud walls and brick walls and block walls, what you're really talking about are different types of a wall family, and specifically, a basic wall family in that case. Now, let's dig a little bit deeper into, then, what kinds of wall families we have at our disposal. There's actually only three. So we have a basic wall, this is simple layered construction where you have one or more layers of material sandwiched together, and if you look at the wall either in section or in floor plan, you'd see essentially the same thing, the same set of layers running in both directions. So that's why they call it a basic wall, because the structure is basic in that sense, it's the same material throughout, regardless of how you slice it. A stacked wall is slightly more complicated because it's got two or more basic walls literally stacked on top of each other vertically. So if you slice it in plan, you're going to see the structure of whichever basic wall you happen to be slicing through, but if you look at it in section, you're going to see the entire stack. So it's actually going to vary in that vertical height versus what it looks like horizontally. And then, our most complex wall family is the curtain wall. This has a complex grid pattern and structure that defines a series of bays running both horizontally and vertically, and then we can express those bays using a variety of nested sub-components. So one way to think about the three different wall families is that they get progressively more complex as you move from basic wall on up to curtain wall. Now, in the videos that follow in this chapter, we're going to look at each kind of wall and get a little bit of hands-on experience with each one.

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