Creating a Face-Based Mechanical Equipment Family in Revit

So I'm going to go ahead and go file. I'm going to go new. I'm going to new family.

Now, I'm going to scroll down. Now, if I look at mechanical equipment, you can see that I have ceiling-based, wall-based, or just regular mechanical equipment. Now, we need to go ahead and make sure we're using a face-based.

Well, the template that they give for that is, is going to be generic model face-based. Now, it sounds kind of weird that we're starting with a generic model, but we can change the category of the family once we're in there. So I'm going to go ahead and go generic model face-based.

I'm going to go ahead and hit open. There we are. And I've started with this template.

So it's given me this family one reference level. Now, the one thing you have to remember when you're, when you're modeling a face-based family, I'm looking at this currently in plan view. So I don't want to model it in plan view like this, how I want it to be.

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I want to look at the face, and I'm going to actually have it kind of sticking up off here off the, off the front of this, so that when I host it to the wall face, imagine taking this and rotating it 90 degrees up so that it's sticking off the wall. The first thing I want to do though is I want to change my category. So I'm going to come up here to my family category and parameters.

It's currently generic models because that's the template I started off with. I'm going to change that to mechanical equipment. So I just scroll down, change it to mechanical equipment, hit okay.

Now I've defined this family as a mechanical equipment family. One thing I always really like to do when I'm building families is to define my geometry by reference plans first. And what I really mean by that is draw my reference planes that I know I'm going to use to establish the size of the geometry.

There's that aspect. The other aspect you have to remember and pay attention to is the intersection of this reference plane and the intersection of this reference plane is the insertion point. If I were to place this on a wall or a vertical surface, this point represents zero zero.

And so that means that this point, that's where it's going to be placing relative to the floor level. So I'm going to end up building my unit along this bottom plane, but then I'm going to build up so that when I elevate it, the bottom of my hood is what I'm really specifying. So what I can go ahead and do is I'm going to go create.

And again, I'm going to start with my reference planes. So I go reference plane. I'm going to create, and I'm not worried about where the dimensions are right now.

I don't care. I'm just going to draw in what I want. I know I'm going to want a box here.

Okay. I'm going to go now. I'm going to go to my dimension tool, aligned, and let's put in some dimensions here.

I'm going to give myself an equality constraint. So all I ended up doing here was I went over to annotate, aligned, reference plane to reference plane to reference plane, hit EQ, and then I'm going to give another dimension that goes the entire width. Then I'm going to give a dimension here from here to here, which is going to be my height parameter eventually.

Now that I've started to set this up, I'm going to go ahead and assign some parameters. If I go, if I select here, I'm going to go up to the top, create parameter. I'm going to call this hood width.

I'm going to make it a type parameter. It's fine as a length dimensions. Everything there is good.

Hit okay. Then here, I'm going to come to this one and I'm going to change this. I'm going to change this to hood, and I'm going to go here to type, make sure it's under type and hit okay.

Now that those are parameters, I can adjust these. So I can make this say two feet. I can make this hood width say six feet.

And there we go. You can see the reason for the equality constraint is so that my right reference plane and my left reference plane move the same. So there we go.

Take that up. And sometimes you just need to adjust these. If the parameters and dimensions start to kind of get overwhelming with the scale you're at and everything, you can always change your scale here.

And this isn't going to be affecting anything with your modeling or anything. I can change it to like three inches. Maybe not three inches equals a foot.

Let's go one inch equals a foot. There we go. So it just balances the dimensions alone better.

I'm also going to go to either any of my elevations here. So I can go to my front elevation and I'm actually going to create a reference plane along the top here. And this is going to be my depth.

Because remember, I'm projecting off of this surface. So I'm going to go create a dimension di for dimension. And when I'm here, what I really like to do is when I host these dimensions, I like to host them to references or like the level.

So I'm going to host it, I'm going to hit TAB till I get to ref level to the level line, you can see how I have that highlighted. And then I'm going to go here. And you can always check the bottom left corner to see what you're selecting.

So down here in the bottom left, what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to di for dimension. Again, I'm going to hover and notice how at the bottom is his extrusion shape handle. Now that is assigning to the actual solid there.

And that is my face. If I hit TAB, it says level, level reference level reference, I hit TAB again, I can go to the reference point. In this instance, I kind of want to just go to that reference level.

So I pick there, drag up pick there. Perfect. And looking good, I'm going to assign a parameter to this also go here, create parameter, I'm going to call this hood depth and hit OK.

Now the dimension that we said we want to be four foot by six foot, so four foot depth. So I can now this is a parameter and come into here and type four feet. Now I've kind of started to frame this guy out.

So I'm going to go back to my floor plan. And there we are. So I started to frame this out, we have our dimensions, we have our size.

So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go hit create. And I'm going to go to an extrusion. Now, if you haven't done too much family making, don't be worried, this is a pretty simple family, not anything's gonna be too crazy happening here.

What I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to have, I'm going to create a rectangle from this corner, this intersection intersection to this intersection. The one thing you want to remember to do here is to lock your lines to these reference points. So a lot of people when they start making families and those kind of items, I was a big proponent of never using reference points.

I hated reference points when I started Revit. But they are super important when building families. Notice all my parameters were set up before I even started modeling any of my solid geometry.

All the parameters were set to reference points. And then all of my geometry will be locked to those reference points. So that then I can go ahead and manipulate the reference points with manipulating the geometry.

So make sure you lock those in. Right, just like that. I'm going to go ahead and hit finish.

And there we go. Now if I change my hood width, let's say to five feet, see how my unit or let's say my hood height to let's say one foot. Notice how those change because I locked those there.

So I just undid control Z. I'm going to go back to any of my elevations here. Now you may notice that I didn't get the depth in there. And that's because the extrusion start was 00.

The extrusion end by default is always one foot, I need to get it up to this plane. Well, I can't really, you know, I can't lock it in my sketch mode in this instance. So because I can't edit my guy, I have to go back to the view that I was drawing it in.

So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm actually going to align to this. If you don't lock your lock your extrusions or your solids to a reference plane from the beginning when you're doing the sketch, you can always use the align tool to go ahead use a line, I'm going to select a reference plane, select here, and then I can just lock it there. Now it abides by this head depth.

And there we go. So I built my entire family, really the basis of my family with reference planes, then I went ahead and assigned and locked the solid edges of the geometry to those reference planes. Let's take a look at it in 3D real quick.

So I'm going to come up here to a little house, go hit 3D and there is my hood. That's to be honest, I could be happy with that. I could be happy with a generic box that I can just tag and say, hey, this is the size, I'm not necessarily gonna be worried about it, we're gonna do a little bit more work on it.

But I'm not gonna be too worried about overall. The other thing we need to go ahead and is create this PSP off the front of it that has the six, the 12 inches, and the six inch depth. So I'm going to go back to my I'm going to go to my let's say left elevation.

So in my left elevation, I'm looking at it from the left side. So imagine this, I'm looking here, left elevation should be over the over on this side here. So I'm gonna go left, I want to go ahead and I'm going to draw this, I'm going to create another extrusion off the front of this, that's gonna be my PSP accessory.

So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm actually going to create another reference plane, create reference plane, I'm gonna create two more here and here, these are going to define the box I'm going to use for my my PSP. So I'm going to go di for dimension, I know it wants to be six inches tall, by 12 inches wide. So I'm going to now I need to adjust these reference planes.

So what I can do is since I've assigned dimensions to those reference planes, I can select them here, I'm going to go ahead and change this to one foot here, changes to zero space six. And there we go. That is where my PSP is going to be, or that perforated supply.

So I can create my extrusion here, we'll create it in this view. And I'll kind of show you guys how we can make that work. So I can go create, I can go extrusion, I'm going to do that rectangle again, pick here, down to here.

And I mean, I'm going to lock my solid edges of my sketch the edges of my solid to the reference points and finish. Pretty good. What I can go ahead and do is I'm going to go to my my reference plan.

Now you'll see I have that little extrusion here. Well, I want this to also span the length. So I'm going to assign these edges to those reference planes.

So I'm going to go online, pick here, pick there, lock it, pick here, pick here, lock it. Now, if I look at my 3D, that guy is there. And so it's going to match that length.

If I go back to my plan view, let's go back to my reference level. Let's say I change this to four feet, maybe it's getting shorter. Notice how all those pieces change.

Because again, I've assigned the parameters to the reference planes. And then I've locked the geometry to those reference planes. When the reference planes move, the geometry moves.

I'm gonna change that back to six feet. Let's go ahead and take a look at this in 3D. And it's looking it's coming along pretty good.

I'm going to go and save this video. Let's actually go ahead and save this file real quick. So I'm going to go File, Save.

I'm going to go to my Documents folder, VDCI, into my File Downloads, my Families and References. And I'm just going to go ahead and name this BIM321-Kitchen-Hood. Everything there is good.

Hit Save. And there we are. I'll go ahead and see you guys in the next video.