Assembling the fine detail capital

- Well, if you're like me, this is the movie you've been looking forward to. This is the one where we get to assemble all of the fine detail pieces into our completed Fine Detail Capital. So, I have a file here called Find Capital Start and it is just a copy of the Medium Detail version. And, for most of the work that we're going to do here, It's going to be as simple as scrolling down here in project browser, locating the various Families loaded in here, in the Families branch, and right clicking and reloading them from the fine detail versions. So, what's really neat about this reload option is you can choose a totally different file. So, if I go to my Fine Detail Abacus and Bell for example, and open that up I'll get this Family Already Exists message and there's two options here. Overwrite the existing version or, the second option here with its parameter values. The first option is just the geometry of the Family. The second option would also overwrite any type values in the types of that Family. Well, since we really didn't do anything, in the types of these Families, it doesn't really matter which one we choose. I'm just going to stick with the first option for this example, overwrite the existing version. Now, because the abacus has a lot of curved faces now, I get this little warning here that the geometry no longer defines a plane, but I'm not too concerned about that one. So, I'm going to click away and ignore that. Let me go to the next Family, the Floret, and reload. And, once again, go to the location where I've stored our fine detail version. Fine Floret Leaf, open that up, overwrite the existing. And, that's the basic process. Now, there's a couple of them that we're going to need to do a little bit differently. So, I'm going to skip Flower and Leaf for now. Both of those are going to require some special attention. Let me go down to the Volutes, reload. And I've got my Fine Volute Big here, load that in, overwrite the existing. That looks real nice. Let's do the small one. Right there, Fine Volute Small, overwrite that existing one. And there it is. Okay, so that leaves us with the flowers and the leaves. And, there's two completely different issues involved with each of those. Let's do the simpler one first, the leaves. Right now, we have a Medium Leaf Family that has two types, short and tall. We can't reload the Family because it would replace all of them with the same instance. So, instead of having eight tall and eight short, we'd have 16 of the same. So, what I'm going to do, is first go to the Insert tab, and click Load Family. I'll browse to the location, I'll browse to the location, and select my Fine Leaf Tall, and load that in. Now, that simply just makes this family available to this project. You can see it listed right there. Now, I'm going to right click the Tall Leaf here on browser and choose Select All Instances Visible in the View. And that will select the eight instances that I have there on screen. And then, from the type selector, I can scroll through and find the Fine Leaf Tall and choose that Family to swap it in. Now, I will get an error here, telling me that it can't keep the elements joined. When I built the Medium Detail version, I joined the leaves together, to make them look a little bit better, but I don't need them to be joined anymore. So, I'm just going to click Unjoin Elements there. So, that's the Tall Leaves and now I can right click the Medium Leaf, reload and choose the shorter leaf to swap in for the remaining eight leaves. I'll overwrite the existing, just like we did before, and I'll unjoin the elements. So, that leaves us with the Flower. Now, the Flower I originally did the same way, by doing Reload Family. Its appeared to work just fine. But then I discovered a nasty side effect of doing it that way. So, let me explain to you why that's a bad idea. These flowers in the Medium Detail version are created in the massing environment. And, the flower that we're actually going to use from the Fine Detail version is created in the traditional Family editor. Even though you can right click a massing Family, and choose Reload, and reload it with a traditional Family, it's a really bad idea. Because, what'll happen is, then if I try to do anything to that Family after it's loaded, it becomes very unstable and Revit crashes. And, I experienced this, so I will spare you the experience. And instead, what we're going to do is, we're going to right click and choose All Instances here and delete these. And you can see that I had them placed on these points right here. So, to make our job a little simpler I'm going to use my Control key, select those two, spin around, Control key and select the other two and then I'm going to go to Isolate Element. And that gives me these four points. Now, I'm going to go to the Insert tab, click Load Family, and load in my Fine Flower Face based. Now, once it's loaded I can go to Create, go to Component, and use my Set Tool to set the Vertical Reference Plane. The one that's basically parallel to the side of the drum. And then, place on Work Plane, and make sure you're snapping to the point. So, I'm going to type s+x. And now I just need to repeat that on the other four sides. And of course, we'll notice the next problem is that the flowers are all facing in instead of out. That's easy to fix. So, you just select one of the flowers and you should see this little Flip Work Plane control appear. If you just click that, that will flip it around the other way. So I just need to do that all four times, like so. And then I will reset the temporary hide. And now, we're really starting to get somewhere. Now of course, we have one last Family that needs to be loaded, but we can't do Reload Family because that Family wasn't part of the Medium Detail version, and that is the small bit of foliage that occurs at the top of the Volute there. So, what I'm going to do is go to my Floor Plan View. I'll zoom in, maybe on this corner right here. And, if you look carefully, you can see a little purple reference point right there. That's what I'm going to use for the insertion of this. I'll click Component, and I'll load a Family. It's the Fine Abacus Leaf. Now, when this comes in, there's a Placement Plane Option right here. And, I'm going to open up that drop down list, and I want to choose Abacus Bottom as my placement plane. That will put it at the correct height. And then, I'm going to come over here and snap to this reference point that you see. And I'll just sort of click a point to place that in, and click Modify. Now, like we saw before, sometimes you click, and it doesn't look like it did anything. Either click Modify to cancel the command, or just pan a little bit to refresh your screen, so that you don't inadvertently put in two, or three, or four of these. But anyway, I've got it here. It's of course oriented the wrong way. So, let me just go to rotate. It should see the reference point as the center of rotation, so that's good. I'll do the start angle running hortizonal and I'll just rotate it 45 degrees. That puts it right there. I'll zoom out a little bit. Mirror it around this reference plane. Hold my Control key down, tab in here and select both of them, and mirror them over here. And then, let's go back to 3D, and that looks fantastic, right? So, we now have our Fine Detail version. One last thing I want you to check is right click each Family, choose Select All Instances Visible in View. And then, scroll down here on the Properties pallet, and just make sure that your materials parameters are linked up for all the Families. So for example, right here, you can see that these, if I right click and select All Instances, you can see they're a slightly different color there. You can see that the material is not parameter, is not linked up because we just brought those in. So let's just go ahead and link that up. Just double check all of them, just to make sure. That way, you'll have one material parameter that controls the entire Column Capital. So, all that remains is to save the Family, and then, in the next movie, we will assemble it together with the rest of the components to build our Full Column.