Building a Detailed Furniture Layout in Revit Using Families from Autodesk and Vendor Libraries

To get started with our layout, I'm going to go ahead and click load family here. And the reason I'm doing that instead of going the other route is because these are actually files that we have within our dataset. And so these are the ones that we were just looking at here.

And so I can go through and find the ones that we want to use. And some of them will give me a nice preview here. Some of them will not, which is most likely because they're in a different release of Revit than the one we're using.

So you can see the dresser gives me a preview because it's most likely going to be from Revit 2025 versus or newer versus some of these older ones here. If I were to want to bring in some of these families, I could start with say this table buffet here and I'll click open. It's going to go ahead and load it in.

And then I can use the architecture and I can go to component and you can see that's the family that's located right there. And I can place it at say somewhere along this wall here because this is going to be like our TV stand essentially. And we can repeat that process.

We'll just insert load family and then we can bring in our coffee table. Okay. And so I'll go ahead and bring in that coffee table, click open here.

And some of these families are going to have a different setup to where they'll come with a text file. And that's kind of what we saw before here is the Revit families and the text files. And the text file is called a type catalog.

And what it'll do is it'll load only the types that you want to bring in. If I wanted to bring in the 30 × 45, whether I'm doing a stone or veneer top, maybe I haven't decided yet, I can load in both of those saying like, you know, I don't think I want the 30 × 30. So I'll go ahead and hit okay on those two.

It's going to upgrade the families. This will be very common when you're bringing stuff in from the internet for sure. And now I've got those both in my project.

If I go the same route architecture component, you can see it's picking that 30 × 45 with the stone top, which is what I'll go here. And one of the things that we've learned in previous courses is when placing families, we can use spacebar to kind of push them around a little bit. And so I'll just set that there temporarily for right now until we get the couch in here.

And so we'll go ahead and continue insert load family, you kind of get the gist of it here. And so here's the couch that we can bring in. And this one only had one type, but it still has the type catalog for us.

And what I do is I use keyboard shortcuts a lot. And so CM is the keyboard shortcut for a component. And so I can set it here for now.

Again, we're probably going to move things around. But just because I can't help myself, I'm gonna line everything up there. And then we can bring in say a side chair here.

And we'll do load family. And then we can take a look at which ones we have available to us. That one's kind of neat.

And we have this Eames chair, which is like a molded plastic chair with some wood legs, just pretty cool chair as well. So I think we'll go ahead and use that one. And this one has a lot of different categories.

So I'm going to go with the plastic with the four leg base. This is also going to bring in a material for us. You can see these are the finishes that are coming in with it.

So I hit OK. You can also select multiple of these two, you don't have to just pick the one. And so let's say I want this one to be sitting somewhere over here.

Or maybe we want to rotate it 45 degrees. We can use this place option. And I can pick the center.

And I can rotate that 45 degrees to have that guy sitting there. Or maybe it's a chair we want to put in the corner over here as like an occasional chair. And I'm going to go ahead and load in some of the stuff from the Autodesk family library.

And so again, we'll click this all results and then go back to furniture. And I'm looking for some kind of stools that we can put along our bar here. And then also like a softer chair that we can put into the living room.

So you can see I can just click on the box and it'll check it. Maybe I'll bring this Corbu in as well. It's kind of cool.

And those look pretty good. We'll eventually need the bed. We might as well snag that while we're at it.

All right. And I'm going to go ahead and click load. It'll load those families in.

And I'll go ahead and use CM for component to set this guy in here. Happen to be on that soft chair there, which is fine. And then I'll do it again.

And then we can pick the rest of our chairs here. And so it's kind of cool because it'll have the ones that we just loaded in available. And so again, just hitting spacebar and I'm just going to place three of these here.

And now we need some end tables and maybe some lighting in here as well. And so if we did load Autodesk family, if I go back to all results here, I can search something like floor lamp and I get all of these extra ones that we could use here. And what I like to do is I like to make sure they're coming from the architectural versus the MEP because they won't have as much stuff associated with them and they tend to be easier to work with.

So I'm going to grab this floor lamp here with the little arm on it. It's kind of cool. And then there's a stand up one, which is kind of a standard floor lamp.

And we'll bring both of those into the project. And the same process. If I use CM, it's going to go with this guy first.

And so I think I'll put this one over here and then we'll use the one with the arm on it down in this area. And I'll rotate that again using that place option. You could always use the center option too, which will just leave it at the middle of it.

I think I'm put this at 45 degrees, kind of on the edge of the couch here. And then we'll bring in our end tables, which are families that I've provided in the dataset for you. We'll do load family.

And this is a side table here that we can bring in and I'll put one on each side of the couch. Okay. And that'll be the bulk of the furniture.

Oh, you know what? We forgot the most important thing here. Got to have a TV, right? And so if I do the load Autodesk family, I bet you there's a TV in here. If I just search television, definitely got one.

We can go with this guy here, but I think that one's a little out of date. We'll pick the plasma, even though that is really out of date as well, but it'll accomplish the same goal here. We'll click load and then I'll use the keyboard shortcut CM to load that.

And this one's going to be a little tricky. We're going to want to pop into that elevation to make sure it's at the right location here. So I place it and you can see it went away.

And so if I go into my elevation of that view and we don't see anything, and I'll give you one guess as to why you were correct. It is because that FF knee work set is set to not visible. If I click show, it'll pop in and then there's my furniture and you can see there's our TV sitting on the ground there.

And so I'm going to go ahead and set that to four feet and then I can align it centered here on top of the console that's there. So I'll pop back over to my furniture plan. And so because I have it at four feet right now, it's actually outside of our cut plane.

If you remember from previous courses, when we look at our view range, which is going to be controlled by our view template here. But when we look at our view range with the cut plane at four feet, we're actually above or right at the bottom of that TV. If I were to make this higher or drop the TV, so if I put this at five feet and hit apply, you can see it starts to show where that TV is.

This is a decision you might have to make sometimes just so you can show the elements that are within your design a little bit better. So I'm going to go and leave that at five, no harm there. We'll hit okay.

And so now my furniture plans will have a cut plane of five feet. Okay, last bit here is the couch. You can see it's just pretty rough outline.

It's not showing a ton of detail. But then when you look at something like the end table, it's got many weird lines on it. And this is part of what you're going to get into as you start downloading families from vendor websites.

Not all of them are created equal. You can see the Herman Miller one is super clean, and it doesn't have many extra lines on it, as well as some of the other ones that we've downloaded that were from the Autodesk library. This one here is very dependent upon the detail level.

And so when I look at the detail level of our view, it's set to coarse right now. But if I go into my view template for the furniture plans, you can see if I change the detail level here from coarse to, say, medium, we're going to start seeing more detail on the different families that we're using. So this one's now showing more detail on what the coffee table looks like, and showing the pieces that are down beneath the stone top.

And so depending on how much detail you want to show in your plan, you can go ahead and up it to medium like I did. And I think the couch looks more appropriate for sure. But it's something to keep in mind.

It's also important to understand, like I said, not all families are created equal. This will definitely get the job done, for sure, for what we're trying to accomplish here. But it's important to know what you're getting into.

So I'm going to go ahead and save this, and then we'll jump into our bedroom next and put the furniture in there.