Learn how to create detail components from a manufacturer's detail using Revit application. This elaborate guide will walk you through the process of importing CAD detail into a detail component family, which can be applied in your project file.
Key Insights
- Creating detailed components involves importing CAD details into a detail component family, which can be done through the Revit application. This process also involves adjusting the line weight and color settings, and aligning the imported symbol with the reference plane.
- You can save your detailed component as a .rfa Revit family file, which can then be imported into your Revit project file. This file will be used under the name it was saved with.
- Adding additional detail to your component can be done by editing the family file. This includes adding elements such as sealant, backer rod, and shims. Once completed, the file can be loaded back into the project file to incorporate the added details.
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In this video we're going to take a look at creating detail components from a manufacturer's detail. Sometimes you'll want to use a particular manufacturer's CAD detail in your details. In this exercise we're going to go over how to import that CAD detail into a detail component family, which then can be used in the project file.
Be sure you've downloaded the files storefrontjam.dwg and storefrontsil.dwg. Go to the Revit application menu at the top left hand corner and let's go ahead and select new family. We're going to select the detail item template and then select open. Now we are in a new family file that's just generically called family1 and we're going to import a DWG file so let's go to the insert tab in the ribbon and again in the family editor you'll notice it's kind of an abbreviated ribbon that's different from a Revit project file and under insert we're going to select import CAD and let's select storefront-jam.
Set the colors to black and white and click open. If you zoom in a bit we see our imported CAD. Let's move this imported symbol so that the midpoint of the item is aligned with the horizontal reference plane.
Let me zoom in a bit here and select the back face of this mullion and move it so that it's aligned with the vertical reference plane. Let's go to the manage tab in the ribbon and under settings there's our object styles so let's select that and if you go to the imported objects tab you'll notice there is the zero layer which is what the layer was of our imported geometry and you can see the line weight is set at one and can be adjusted here. Let's click okay and let's go ahead and save this file as let's go ahead and put it with our Revit project file.
Let's save this as storefront-jam and it'll be a.rfa our Revit family file. Once you've done that we've given it a name. This is the name that it will use when being imported into our Revit project file.
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So at the top right corner of the ribbon let's select load into project and load our family into our project file. Let's go to the view plan detail dash window jam and we're going to place our imported detail right at the jam of our storefront. So to do so we're going to have to go to our annotate tab and select component under the detail panel.
Let's make sure we select detail component and not repeating detail component. So select detail component and then we have a few choices here and it defaults to the latest one imported into the file and that was our storefront jam detail. We can go ahead and place it right over our mullion in this view.
Now if you wanted to edit this family and add any additional detail information such as sealant and backer rod in a shim or something like that we can go ahead and edit our family file. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's select this family.
Select edit family in the ribbon and then we're back into the family editor and let's go ahead and add a half inch sealant and backer rod on the right hand side of our imported detail here. So let's go ahead and just move it over half of an inch and then using detail lines under the create tab let's draw arcs on either end and we're just using the subcategory detail items and you can use different ones for different line weights but in this case we'll just keep it on detail items. Draw another arc to represent sealant on both sides and then we're just going to draw circles that are a half inch to represent the backer rod so we can just kind of move it back.
Just kind of nudge it get it relatively close there and then mirror along an axis and I'll use our horizontal reference plane in this view to create two circles representing the backer rod behind the sealant and then the last step would be drawing in a shim and for this I'm going to go back to creating detail lines and I'm just going to create a line here and then mirror it again along the horizontal reference plane and then create two more lines one to finish off our shim and then another single diagonal line to complete the symbol. Now let's load it back into the project file by clicking this load into project button and it's going to ask if I want to overwrite the existing version and I'll select that say yes and you'll notice now we have the sealant and backer rod showing up in our imported detail and in the detail component I should say. Now let's go ahead and turn off a couple of these things because it's getting a little bit distracting now having the actual mullion from our model appearing here so we can just select that that mullion component right click hide in view element and then we're also seeing the mullion below in elevation so let's select that and do the same hide in view elements do it again there and let's hide our glass we have one more element down here let's hide that so that kind of cleans up our detail here and then all that we have to do now is draw lines to represent the glass and the mullion in elevation below so let's go to annotate tab detail line let's select the line style thin lines and draw one line there and one line there to represent the mullion on the ground and then select the end of the glass there and what I can do here now is just copy multiply multiple copy those lines down and we've updated our detail using the manufacturer's detail last item to wrap up here is to add a keynote that we lost because we hid the mullion you'll notice our detail that was calling out the mullion has been deleted because we hid that object to create a keynote for the mullion that we just lost because we hid that element in this view let's create a user keynote and we'll go to the keynote tool and select user keynote and remember with user keynotes you can select any object and assign it a keynote of whatever you choose so we'll just pick this mullion for example and select under e two inch by five inch aluminum curtain wall mullion e5 and you can see that updates the keynote and then we can just drag that over kind of clean this up get the spacing to be a little bit more even in the next video we're going to repeat the same steps but do it on our sill detail