Designing a project using Revit requires the use of families to help fill the space with furniture and other objects. This article discusses the process of adding furniture to a project in Revit, including the considerations and resources required for this task.
Key Insights
- The article highlights the importance of using the right work set when adding furniture to a project to prevent accidental misplacement. Work sets such as FF&E work set are recommended to represent furniture and equipment.
- Designers can pick generic families from various sources, including Autodesk family or vendors like BIMobject.com. However, not every vendor has a furniture family readily available for use. BIMobject.com allows the user to find actual products that are available for purchase.
- The article emphasizes the importance of organizing the downloaded furniture families properly. It recommends developing a naming convention that includes the manufacturer, category, and description for easy recognition and usage within the project.
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Now that we're going to take a look at adding the furniture to our project, I'm going to jump over to our furniture plan and make sure that I'm on the right work set again. And this is pretty important so that we're not putting stuff where it doesn't belong, right? So I'm going to jump over here, put it on the FF&E work set, because that's going to represent our furniture and equipment work set. And then we're going to go ahead and start looking at ways that we can bring in families.
And so there's a couple of different methods we could do here. We can always go through and pick generic families from load Autodesk family. If I were to go here and browse back to where it's all of the categories, I can just go down to furniture.
And you can see there's many different pieces of furniture that we could use. We've got couches and desks and chairs and beds and the whole deal. We could probably furnish this entire apartment with the furniture that's located here.
And there's nothing wrong with that, because we could accomplish the job. Maybe it's more generic, and we just need to show a layout. And this would work totally fine.
In other cases, we need to be more specific, and we actually have vendors that we're going to be pulling families from. So one thing to keep in mind is not every vendor is going to have a furniture family that you can use. But there are a handful that have them located on a website that's called BIMobject.com. And this is what BIMobject.com looks like.
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And what I've done here is I've just popped over, and you can create an account with your Autodesk account, which you'll have if you have an Autodesk account or license for Revit. But you can always create one for free too. And I'm just going to make sure that we're pulling Revit families from that.
So it'll use this as my filter for search. And then I can search any item, and it'll find it for me. If I were to look for something like, let's say, a nightstand, it'll give me a couple of options to choose from.
And the benefit here is that these are actual products that you can buy. And so if I were to go into this product here, you can see that I've got options to download these. It gives me specifications for it, links to the actual product, and then it breaks down like the classification and things.
And so once you've started that search, you can see too that it's just going to keep kind of rolling down and giving you more from that vendor. The one thing that you want to make sure and check on when you go to download these is that you're downloading a native Revit file. So it's very important to look at this very closely.
And so you can see here, this family happens to have many different versions. But when you look at the files that we would be downloading, they're all.RFAs. And so when I have it set to Revit here, I can change this to only native file formats, and it'll filter it. This one didn't need to.
And then if I deselect all, you can see I can just decide to download just the one that I want. And so I've provided a lot of these for you already, just so you don't have to go through this process. You may not even have access to it.
And so I want to make sure you have families that you can put into our project. But I definitely encourage you to use this as an opportunity to design something yourself. So you don't necessarily have to do the layout that we're about to do here.
You definitely don't have to use the furniture that we're going to do here. But I want you to be familiar with the process of placing the furniture, eventually tagging it, and setting it in a schedule. So a couple of things that we want to look at here, and I'll show you the folder, what it looks like with all the stuff that we've downloaded.
And the one thing that's going to be important is when you look at this, you can see here, the names are kind of all over the place. And so I've gone to Herman Miller and downloaded a few things. It's another really good resource for this.
But you can see some of them came in with some pretty wild characters. There certainly is not a consistency between the naming conventions here. You can see this one, furniture, chairs, stools, benches, hay seating, silhouette, sofa, and then the whole deal.
And so that's something you want to consider before you start bringing these things into your project, is knowing what 6431-38 is and 64313-49. I have no idea what this is. And so my point here is that as we're downloading and organizing a library, we want to come up with a naming convention that's going to work for us.
And so in this case, we would want to name it by categories. And so when I see things like Herman Miller, ancillary Eames coffee table, that seems to make sense because it's a manufacturer, kind of a category to it, and then what it actually is. Whereas some of these other ones, it starts to get a little bit too wordy here.
We can change some of these to have a more consistent naming convention if we're going to use the manufacturer, like a category, and then more of a description. I think that's going to work best as we go through here. If I were to go through and rename a few of these, you can see the SSG stuff is kind of in that setup already, where it's the manufacturer, what it is, and then these are the finishes that are on top of it, but it follows a similar pattern as the Herman Miller ones.
And so what I'll do is just look at some of these here. So like this one, if I were to rename the file, and it's important to rename the file because once it gets loaded into Revit, it's going to use this to organize it. And so this is a chair, stool, benches, Tom Dixon scope.
So Tom Dixon seems to be the manufacturer here. And then it'll be a chair. And then we can give it the actual name.
So it seems like it's the scoop low wood. And so you can see as we go through and do the renaming, we could end up with a system that gives it a little bit more clarity for when we go to find it. And so I'll kind of show you what that looks like in our model here in a second.
So it's really important to be able to go through, like I said, find things from a, this is just a repository of things. But there's also Herman Miller, which has many things that we can search to find. So I can search for a couch, and it'll find many different things that turned out to not be such a good one.
But if I did seating, it'll give me many things in here. And a lot of this is commercial furniture. So it ends up being harder to apply to a residential application.
But they definitely have plenty of residential families. And these are all very high quality. And they're modeled incredibly well, so that they do translate well in Revit.
And also if you were to use this for like a high quality rendering. So what we'll do is we'll use the furniture that we have available to and then go ahead and start laying out our living room.
