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574 | ChaptEr 14 Designing with the Family eDitor

width, or material. In the real world, each of these parameters is critical. Suppose you have
only three options for each of these values—this results in 81 permutations! Who has time to
manually create each of these options? But this is what you’d have to do if you were using a
generic modeler rather than Revit, where these options are driven by rules. By using parameters
to define dimensions, materials, nested elements, and more, you can create additional
permutations on the fly.

Understanding In-place Families
In the previous chapter, you learned how to create an in-place void family in order to customize
the edge of a floor slab. While some truly unique content in your project can be modeled using
in-place families, it is often a dead-end process that robs you of hours of otherwise productive
time for a number of reasons.
First, an in-place family should be used only in cases where the object that you’re making
is not likely to be moved, rotated, or copied. Any attempt to move, rotate, or copy an in-place
family can often have unintended consequences that are difficult to remedy. For example, if you
model an in-place family and then create copies in your project, they may all initially look the
same, but in fact you’re creating new unique families—not just copied instances of the same
family. Therefore, if you modify one of the copied instances of an in-place family, the other copy
will remain unchanged.
Second, each copied instance will schedule independently from the other instances as
separate line items. This is often not desirable because you may want to group like elements
together in a schedule.
Finally, there’s no way to convert an in-place family into a component family. In some cases,
you can copy and paste sketch lines or other 2D elements between the project and family
environments. But if you try to copy and paste geometry from the project environment to the
Family Editor, you’ll get an error stating that you can’t copy between family and project. The
only way to proceed is to start again in the Family Editor.

Content Guidelines and Standards

Before you begin to create your own custom content, you should be aware of the vast number of
online content providers in the aeC industry. at the time of the publishing of this book, there
are over 1,000 building product manufacturers providing revit families. There are also over 20
online content-hosting providers such as autodesk seek, revitCity, national Bim library, Bimstore,
and arCat Bim objects (just to name a few). Because most of these providers offer content for
free, how can you be sure that the content you download will be usable or will support extended
interoperability and collaboration?
a few of the content-aggregating sites offer content standards or guidelines. For example, you can
download the “revit model Content style guide” from the autodesk seek site at:
http://seek.autodesk.com

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