Basic family modeling - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] Thank you for joining me. While there are probably plenty of different furniture pieces that we could be modeling for this course, we're going to just focus on a few and one of 'em is this piece here, which is a divider bookshelf. And the way that we are going to tackle this is it's actually going to be a few components that are going to be put together. I'm going to go ahead and start with the first simple component, which is the small bin. And I'm just going to click on one of those here so you could see it. This here, it is its own piece. So to start this piece, here's what you need to do. We're going to start from the file menu. We're going to click on file, and we're going to say new. And instead of this being a project this is actually going to be a family. That's the first difference there. So we're going to click on family. And then from there we are going to then choose the type of model that this is. Because this is essentially a bookshelf that has a piece of furniture if you will that is on it, we're actually going to categorize it altogether. And we should go ahead and categorize this as furniture. If though for some instance this piece ends up being something that is actually built into the space that you're putting it into where it requires some type of installation that actually should be considered casework because of the work that goes into it. If it is something that is comprised of multiple pieces that each can have various configurations on them, we could consider this to be a furniture system. So it really could be both of these. Matter of fact, let's go ahead and let's make it a furniture system because it has components to it. That is vital and important because if you are to take this and then put this into a project and schedule it, you want it to schedule properly. So I'm going to go ahead and click on open. So it's going to start us off in our first view, which is the ref-level view. And that is the view that is looking from up above or our top view. From here, this is where you're going to make decisions on how you're going to actually build this piece. I'm just going to go, mention some of these up top and then we'll get into 'em a little bit further. The first one that you see up here is an extrusion where it essentially takes a profile and it extrudes from that profile a certain distance. A blend is a little bit different where it takes two shapes and connects them together using vertices. A revolve will take a profile, it will rotate it around an axis, and it will create a cylindrical shape. A sweep is one profile that is extruded along a certain path that we give it. A swept blend is very similar to a sweep where instead you take two profiles and you extrude them along a path and they use vertices to do so. Those are going to be our main ones that we are going to be working in. One last thing you want to do when you are just starting out a family is you want to save your item. And the reason for this is if you don't it'll go up to the default name which is family one, and then if you accidentally load this into a project that you're working in and then you start another family without saving that one as well your project browser's going to be filled up with all these different names that are called families and you won't know what anything is. So I always do this first. So I'm just going to go up to my file menu. I'm going to say save as, I'm going to go to family. I'm going to then make sure I'm in the correct folder that I want to be in and I'm going to call this particular family that we are working on small bin. That way you're now working in the right file.