Exploring Manufacturer Families and Creating Custom Kitchen Hood Model in Revit MEP

Exploring Face Hosting for Custom Kitchen Hood Models in Revit MEP

Discover how to manipulate manufacturer families in Revit MEP Mechanical, using them as a launching point to develop your own models and content library. Understand the benefits and differences between manufacturer families and custom-built content, using a kitchen hood as an example.

Key Insights

  • The article encourages users to examine different manufacturer families in Revit MEP Mechanical, suggesting they inspect parameters, formulas, file sizes, and other details to gain a better understanding of the content.
  • The author demonstrates how to modify a manufacturer family, using a kitchen hood's specification sheet as an example. The process involves adjusting parameters, inputting generic sizing, and adding connectors for specific pieces.
  • The article discusses the considerations when creating a new family in Revit, such as hosting options. It suggests making the kitchen hood model a face-hosted family, allowing it to be hosted to any face, including elements within a linked model.

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Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for Revit MEP – Mechanical. In the previous video, we went ahead and went through a couple of different manufacturer families and kind of looked at some of the specifics and a lot of the information that is included within them. What I would encourage you to do is, maybe you are working in an office now or you've worked in an office previously and you know some of these manufacturers, go take a look, download some of their families, take a peek at the family, see what the file size is, see what the parameters are, what the formulas are, and what information they give you, and just kind of take some time to investigate that.

I think it's a really strong, a really good tool to have in your back pocket—that you can take a manufacturer family and edit it or manipulate it to fit your purposes potentially, because it provides a great starting point to build up your own models, build up your own content library, to have stuff that you want to do and operate as you want it to be. So moving on to the next one, what we're going to go ahead and start looking at is—we're going to start looking at a specification sheet for a kitchen hood, and we're going to kind of, you know, mess around with the parameters a little bit and everything, and we're going to kind of build it out to a Level of Detail 200 or 300-ish series. We're going to be putting in kind of the generic sizing of the unit, we're going to be putting in the connectors for the specific pieces and a couple of other things.

It's not going to be a super crazy family, but it's going to kind of show you a little bit—highlight the differences between maybe what a manufacturer family can provide and what maybe a custom-built or something that we build ourselves provides, and shows off a little bit of the differences between the two. So in your project files, I have put in there what is called kitchen hood specifications, and this is a real-life kitchen hood from a manufacturer. They give some of the sizing and everything here.

Kitchen hoods are a little bit different—typically the lengths are kind of custom-made. They can be to set sizes, but you won't see any lengths or really a whole lot of dimensions here, but typically you would get those dimensions from shop drawings. If you open that up, you can use any PDF viewer to go ahead and open that up.

I'm just going to drag this on here and kind of show you guys what I have. We have this ND2 made by Captive Air, a very common hood, and traditionally the hood is just exhaust only, but it has an accessory that can make it a makeup air also, and we're going to include that accessory in our model here. So I've also pasted in this little kind of 3D isometric so we can kind of talk about what's happening here.

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We have the actual hood. The thin portion here on the front is going to be what is their makeup air. I believe that they call it their PSP, but what this does is that this is an exhaust here on the back, and this is an in or a supply on the front. So this is exhausting air out, this is bringing fresh air in so that you get a good flow of air, and this is perforated so that fresh air flows in right where someone is cooking, and then the cooking fumes and everything get exhausted straight out.

So let's go ahead and take a more look at this. So it gives us some other information. Okay, you can see we have some dimensions here. So what we're going to say for our dimensions here—we're going to go ahead and make this guy like six feet long, and then we're going to say that traditionally, these tend to be 48 inches. Most kitchen equipment tends to be about 30 or 36 inches deep, so 48 inches is a good size to go based on.

We have our 16-inch baffle here as they’re calling it. They do have a grease pan, and you know, we don't necessarily need to model every single little piece of this. So that's kind of one of the things I want to highlight—the difference between a manufacturer family and something we may create on our own is that it gets it across for the documentation purposes. We'll be able to tag it, we'll be able to schedule, be able to do all those things and give manufacturer information and everything, but we don't necessarily need to include every little piece. So you can go ahead down here—the perforated supply plenum, which is that PSP I was talking about—you can see we have some dimensions for that. So they can either be 12 inches by 6 inches, or they can—I believe there's another size on here—22 × 6 inches. We're probably just going to go ahead and create the 12-inch one. That’s what we're going to say that we need for this, and that's really the end of the drawing. Some manufacturers will give you a little more information. We're going to go ahead and have some information that we kind of maybe talked to the rep, and they were all like, "Hey yeah, this is the size you want to do." We're going to make it six feet by four feet. That’s going to be our overall size, and we'll go ahead and get into that.

So one thing—when we start with a family, when we start creating a family—the one thing we need to think about is, first of all, how are we going to be using this family? If I look over here in the kitchen—right—so I have over here in the kitchen, I do have, and I believe that this is a wall. Let’s see here. So this wall is only up to four feet, so this wall really doesn't work too well for us for our kitchen line per se. We may want to have our cook line on this side. That would be a discussion with the Design Team, the Architect, and other Team Members—and obviously the client—to say, "Hey, where do you want your cook line to be? How do you want this to be?" But we're going to go ahead and use this one here—right here, this wall right here—because this is a full-height wall. Right now, that's where we'll be placing our hood.

Now we need to think about how do we want to place it. Do we want it to be hosted to the wall? Do we want it to be face-hosted? Do we want it to not have a host and we can just move it and put it wherever we want? These are all questions that, when you start talking about families, that you want to sit down and think about. Because the main reason is—I'm going to save my project here. Once you've established a hosting type for a family, it is very tough to change. You really can't change the hosting once it is built in—it's going to be hosted that way. So you want to make sure you think about that. In this instance, I think I'm going to make this a face-hosted family. The reason being—so I can host to a wall. It's a wall-mounted unit.

Now, you might be asking yourself, "Well Tyler, why aren't you using a wall-hosted family?" Well, that's a great question. The reason why I'm not going to use a wall-hosted family is that yes, Revit does know that this is a wall, right? Revit—I can select it—it says wall. The thing is though, is that when Revit comes to detecting the elements—when you're trying to host to items—a linked model does not register as a wall. I'm not 100% sure why that is, but if I were to make it a wall-hosted family, I would not be able to host it to this element. I'm going to make it a face-hosted family so that I can host it to any face—so a linked model, the faces within that linked model, I can go ahead and host to those. We want to start off with an equipment or with a template for face hosting. I'm going to stop this video here, and we'll see you in the next one.

photo of Tyler Grant

Tyler Grant

Revit MEP Instructor


Tyler Grant is a BIM Manager a Delawie. A dedicated, goal-oriented, and experienced architect. Tyler has managed multiple design/build BIM projects from inception to construction completion, through all phases. Technology-driven and experienced educator to train and instruct users, both novice and advanced, in the workflow and processes of the modern architecture, engineering, and construction field. 

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How to Learn Revit MEP

Specialize in MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) systems within Revit for advanced design solutions.

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