5 Tips & Tricks in the Family Editor

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Below are 5 basic tips and tricks that everyone using Revit should be aware of when creating Revit content.  I am not going to go into advanced formula or anything to crazy, just 5 basic tips that are useful.

Have you noticed that even the simplest of Revit families can be quite a large file size?  Well there is a reason for this and this can be reduced dramatically without and compromising the family.

The problem lies with Revit itself and the family editor. It is a problem that has existed since Revit 2008.  Here is the scenario - you make a family with a filesize of around 200k, then you open the family and make some adjustments and re-save the family, you notice that the file size has more than doubled and is now over 900k!

I won’t get to geeky on why this happens, but it’s to do with Revits database architecture.  There is however an easy workaround that gets those file sizes back to a more reasonable size.  When opening and editing a family, instead of doing a “save” do a “save as” and save it as a different name.  This reduces the file size back down to a more reasonable size.

TIP 2 - Trajectory Segmentation

When working with Circles, Arcs or curves in the family editor there is a feature called Trajectory Segmentation that is normally overlooked but is a useful feature to be aware of.

Trajectory Segmentation enables you to specify an angle, and the curve can be Segmentated by the specified angle as below.

So when would you ever use this?  Well I recently created a circular roof light and one of the challenges was how to make the glass panels adjust when the rooflight “radius” parameter was adjusted. The Trajectory Segmentation feature was exactly what was needed to do this.

You can download the family HERE if you want to dissect in greater detail of how it was done.

TIP 3 - Centre Point of Arcs and Circles

Have you ever wanted to give a setting out dimension or coordinate of centre point of a circle or arc? Well there is an option to turn this on any curved object such as lines, walls and sweeps etc.  It also works in sketch mode which can be useful.  This is one of those basic features that many new users are not aware of until shown.

To turn on the centre mark of a curve, click on the object then in the “instance” properties you should see the option to show the entre mark.

This not only works in the family editor with sketch lines and detail lines, but also in the project environment with walls etc as shown above.

TIP 4 - Add clash zones into your families

Performing clash detection is common place in a BIM/Revit environment, however these are mostly physical clashes, i.e. one piece of solid geometry hits another piece of solid geometry. There is however other types of clash that must be considered.

Imagine a door in Revit, as standard the doors in revit are modelled closed which is fine however, what if something is sitting within the doors swing? It wouldnt be a phsical geomentry clash so would not be picked up as a clash. This is common place and such things could be pendant light fittings, furniture, columns etc.

We can get around this by adding solid geometry to represent the door swing zone as below.

Obviously we don’t want to see this geometry when the family is loaded into our project, so to get around this we set its visibility properties to not display.  Even when we set it to not display, Revit still detect the geomentry in the family and detects a clash.

Other things we have used this method for are disabled toilet zones, wheelchair refuge zones, hand clearance zones around pipes, opening swings on windows etc..

TIP 5 - Share your families!

This is Probably my most important tip of this blog post!  Once you create your superb masterpiece of parametric genius then share it with the rest of the Revit world and upload it to Revitspace! 

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