Learn how to enhance your Revit projects by adding furniture families, and gain insights into creating and modifying custom families when needed. This article also provides an understanding of manipulating families using parameters, a crucial skill in the world of Building Information Modeling (BIM).
Key Insights
- Furniture families, such as the 'table dining round with chairs', can easily be added to your Revit projects, often already preloaded with the software.
- Understanding how to create custom families in Revit is essential, particularly when needing to modify an existing family created by a manufacturer that does not meet your specific requirements.
- Manipulating families using parameters allows for automatic adjustments, such as an increasing number of chairs as the table size grows, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of your project.
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Now that we've started adding families into our project, we're gonna go ahead and continue on with adding some of the break room furniture. And in this case, we're gonna use a preloaded family that Revit has provided with the installation and it's also already loaded into our model here. And you'll find as you do more projects, that's gonna be more often the case than it is to have to go in and create a lot of custom families.
That being said, knowing how to create families and knowing the ins and outs of creating something like we just did here is a really important skill. It's also important to know how families are created because what if you get one from like a manufacturer and it's just terrible and it doesn't do everything you need and you have to go in and modify it. So the best way to know how to modify a family is to be able to create them from scratch.
So let's go ahead and load in the table family that we're looking for here. And like I said before, it's already part of our project. We'll go to component and we're gonna look for table dining round with chairs.
And we want that 36 inch diameter. And you can see the preview here shows us the table we're looking for. And so I'll go ahead and place this in a couple of locations.
So I'll just put one here, say another one there and we'll just have a total of four that I'm just gonna place. And I kind of lined them up. You didn't necessarily have to do that but it works out pretty well that way.
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And then this break room tag is definitely in the way. If you remember from BIM 101, if we wanna move a tag outside of the room boundary, we need to first assign a leader to it by selecting the tag and telling it to use a leader. And then I can use that move symbol to drag it outside of the room boundary.
And then as long as I keep this dot within the boundary, you can see it starts to freak out when I don't. Then we can have the tag and the leader located wherever we want. Next thing I could do is I can go ahead and I could, if I wanted to show these in a different configuration, like let's say rotated for whatever reason, I can do that.
So I could rotate these and I'll go ahead and rotate them 45 degrees and it just gives us a different layout. I'm also gonna delete these dimensions here because we don't need them anymore. They were only needed for the creation of the bathroom.
So I'll go ahead and unconstrained that. And I'm gonna move this up because we're gonna have some other elements down in this area. So got a little too far South with my tables.
So I'll go ahead and move those a little further up and then I'll rotate the rest of these. And so I'm just gonna use the rotate tool and it's pretty simple. We just pick a point, start moving it and then type in our rotation.
And since I've already rotated two, I'll just delete those ones and copy it down since we haven't really tagged anything yet. And just make sure everything kind of stays lined up there. And so this family here is actually one that consists of two different families loaded into one.
We have our chairs, which you see here, and then the table, which is actually loaded in. So I'll click edit family so we can take a look at that setup there. So the table itself was modeled within this family here.
But what we have here is a group of chairs that were loaded in to this family and created as an array. If this table grows, then more chairs will be added based on the formula that's associated with it. And so when I look at the chairs and the number of chairs here, it says six.
And the radius is defined as a diameter divided by two. When I have different table sizes here, you notice that the number of chairs is gonna change. And that's just because as the table gets larger, we can obviously fit more chairs along it.
And so that's one way that we can use the parameters of an array to go ahead and associate that with a family parameter. What we're gonna do in the next video is we're gonna take a look at how we can create a similar type of family where we'll have a workstation. And then within that workstation, we're gonna go ahead and actually add components to it like a filing cabinet and a chair so that we can learn how to create families of this similar type, which these are pretty effective and they work really well if you're using a similar type of element in multiple different locations.
