family, type, instance) that you put in your Revit project to develop and document your design. Content can often maintain relationships with other content, but more important, content maintains relationships to datum objects. As you can see from the Revit organizational chart shown previously in Figure 2.22, content includes system families, component families, and spaces.
System families (also called host families) are content that is part of the Revit project environment. These families are not created and stored in external files (RFAs) – they’re found only in the RVT project file. If you need another type of a system family, you’ll duplicate an existing type from within the project. System families can be 3D elements such as walls, floors, roofs, ceilings, stairs, and railings or 2D elements such as text, dimensions, revision bubbles, and insulation.
Component families are created in the Family Editor and are either 2D or 3D content. This means that you’ll have to create and load these kinds of families outside the Revit project environment as RFA files. When you start to create a component family, you’ll need to select an appropriate family template (Figure 2.38). By selecting the right family template, you’ll be certain that the component that you’re creating is going to behave, view, schedule, and (if necessary) export properly.
Figure 2.38 Selecting a family template
Although most system families help shape the physical aspects of a building, the occupied voids within are critical to a successful design. These elements are spaces, which take the form of rooms and areas. Spaces maintain relationships to datum objects but also to model elements including floors, walls, ceilings, and roofs. In addition to spatial properties, rooms are used to document finishes within your project. Take a look at the properties of a room, and you’ll find Floor Finish, Base Finish, Wall Finish, and Ceiling Finish.
To develop a fundamental understanding of parameters, you must note that there are two kinds of parameters: type and instance. Type parameters control information about every element of the same type. For example, if the material of a piece of furniture is designated as a type parameter and you change it, the material for all the furniture of that type will change. Instance parameters control only the instances that you have selected. So if the material of the piece of furniture that you’ve selected is an instance parameter, you’ll be editing only the selected elements.
Instance parameters can be constantly exposed in the Properties palette. Selecting something initially displays the instance parameters. Figure 2.39 shows the instance parameters of a wall that control the relative height, constraints, and structural usage.
Figure 2.39 Instance parameters of a wall
By clicking the Edit Type button, you expose the type parameters (Figure 2.40). These parameters control values such as the structure, graphics, and assembly code.
Figure 2.40 Type parameters of a wall
This section provided you with a basic overview of families and parameters; you will learn much more about these concepts in Chapter 14.
Views are the means by which you will interact with and document the project. As you can see in the Revit organizational chart shown previously in Figure 2.22, there are both 2D and 3D views. Two-dimensional views are oriented to specific coordinates such as plan, elevation, and section. Schedules and material takeoffs are yet another way of viewing information in a project that is neither 2D nor 3D. Three-dimensional views are either orthographic or perspective (camera view) in nature. Views also have type and instance parameters that control properties such as name, scale, detail level, phase filter, and graphic display options. We’ll review each type of view again in more detail in Part 5, “Documentation.”
Let’s first review, in detail, some of the properties that apply to most views. All of these are found in the Properties palette when no objects are selected; however, some properties may also be accessed in the view control bar. The most common view properties are as follows:
Crop Region With the exception of schedules and drafting views, the extents of all views can be limited using crop regions. The visibility of the crop region itself can be turned off, but you can choose to hide all crop regions in the Print Setup dialog box when using the Print command. Although you might feel the need to keep crop regions visible to allow easier editing, you can use the Reveal Hidden Elements tool in the view control bar to temporarily show hidden crop regions. Buttons to enable/disable and show/hide the crop region are available on the view control bar.
View Scale The scale of a view automatically controls the relative weight of line work as well as the size of annotations such as text, dimensions, and tags. The view scale is displayed on and can be modified from the view control bar.
Visibility/Graphics The Visibility/Graphic Overrides dialog box (Figure 2.41) allows overrides of elements in two essential ways: visibility (turn object categories on/off) and graphics (customize line thickness, color, and fill pattern).
Figure 2.41 Visibility and graphic overrides for an elevation
Detail Level The Detail Level parameter can be set to one of three predefined choices: Coarse, Medium, or Fine. This setting depends on how families are constructed, but it can help improve model performance and avoid cluttered views by limiting the visibility of smaller model elements. Detail Level can be set with a button on the view control bar.
View Template As an aid to standardization, view templates can help you organize common view settings and apply them to groups of views throughout your project and other projects within your office or firm. View templates are covered in detail in Chapter 4.
You can create views in various ways in order to work with your project in a manner that meets your needs. Although creating views is quick and easy, you should avoid populating your project file with too many unnecessary views. An overabundance of unused views will increase the size of your project file and cause it to perform poorly. Let’s review the procedures to create different view types and see how to control their extents after they’re created.
Figure 2.42 Creating new views from the ribbon
Another quick way to create new views is to right-click a view name in the Project Browser and select one of the Duplicate View commands (
