From the course: Revit: MEP Families

Anatomy of a family

From the course: Revit: MEP Families

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Anatomy of a family

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at the anatomy of a family. You will find that families can be fickle. I believe there's a certain order in which families should be created. I believe this because I have screwed up hundreds of families until I got the formula down. I'd like to just quickly run through the process of creating a family from start to finish, and look at the composition. The very first thing I want to look at, and the most important thing in a family are called reference planes. When you start any new family using the templates, you will have reference planes. Usually at least two, but some families have many reference planes. Reference planes are the backbone, literally the skeleton of your family. The second item we're going to have are dimensions. Once we put reference planes in, we want to dimension them. Dimensions keep objects in place and aligned. We can lock dimensions and equally constrain them about our center lines. Once dimensions are placed, the third thing we want to do is add parameters, they're called labels. Labels drive the flexibility of a family. So if we take a look at the example here, we can now add width, height, or whatever label we want. We add that to the dimension we already put in there, and that width and that height are going to flex. The user can now just type in anything they want and our family should adapt to it. The fourth thing I want to look at is the 3D massing, the cool part, but we can't have any 3D massing unless we have the skeleton in place. The 3D massing is simply the physical component of the family. So if we look at a well-made family, we'll see we have reference planes, we have dimensions, and then last but not least, we have our 3D massing. This is how you create a good family from scratch.

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