Key Aspects Concerning Families for Beginners Undertaking Revit Architecture Training

For students and professionals just starting off with Revit Architecture training courses, understanding the fundamentals behind how Revit families work is extremely valuable. Whether working on small-scale projects or implementing BIM techniques for projects of a larger magnitude, knowledge in this area constitutes a major portion of all the building elements that go into your Revit project.

For anyone just entering the world of architectural BIM and Revit, working with Revit families is an integral concept to get to grips with. Small and large AEC firms consider family creation and modification an important part of developing a project workflow and bringing standardisation into projects. The following sections aim to bring greater clarity into the concept of families:

Basic Overview of Revit Families

A family in Revit consists of a group of elements that have common parameters and a similar graphical representation. As a result, although different objects belonging to the same family may have differing values for some or all of their parameters, the set of parameters remain the same. In Revit, some families can be created (or existing ones modified) right in the project environment whilst others have to be created (or edited) outside the project.

Categories of Families

All families in Revit are organised in different categories, such as ceilings, columns, doors, floors, furniture, and furniture systems, among others. The total number of categories remain fixed i.e. the user cannot add more categories or delete the existing ones. The ‘furniture’ category comprises families and family types, including bar stool, carpet, chair-array, desk-reception, sideboard, and drafting table, among others. To take another example, the ‘columns’ category comprises families, including chamfered column, rectangular column, round column, and wood timber column.

Family Types

Simply put, these are the variants existing within the same family. For instance, a ‘cabinet-storage’ family consists of four variants, each varying in dimensions. The key point to note is that these four variations have the same set of parameters; however, the value of those parameters varies. Unlike categories, users can create new (or delete existing) family types within the project environment.

Changing Family Type Parameters vs. Changing Family Instance Parameters

One of the important things that beginners need to understand is the difference between changing parameters of family types and modifying parameters of individual family instances. Each element inserted in a Revit project is an instance of a particular family type. This instance is an entity which has a set of properties. When you change these parameters (called family instance parameters), you are modifying a single instance of a respective family type. On the contrary, when you change type parameters, all the instances of the said family type placed in the project change accordingly.

As a case in point, if we place 15 double hung windows (24"x72") in our Revit model and modify instance properties of a one of them, the other 14 would not be affected. However, if we change parameters of the ‘double hung windows’ family, all 15 would be affected since all the instances belong to the same family type.

Prabhat Singh heads Grey Edge, a leading Autodesk Revit MEP Training Centre in Mumbai. Prabhat has been instrumental in designing many types of curriculum related to domains, such as architecture, interior design and web designing and development.