trmurphy Posted July 7, 2014 Posted July 7, 2014 hi anyone know if it is possible to create a family using existing family members and not extrusions? what i need to do is create a family consisting of a single vertical plane unistrut frame that is copied along a bay of columns. however since the size of the unistrut can change i would rather be able to open the family and change the strut from a drop down menu from the unistrut family, then save the parent family and all change within that bay. hope thats clear! like in CAD where you create a block then you just have to change it once when there's multiple instances. i know this is similar to families but in cad you could make a block out of multiple blocks cant seem to do that in revit any help appreciated! Quote
tzframpton Posted July 7, 2014 Posted July 7, 2014 Well, first off, a Structural Member Family must be an extrusion. How else will you be able to make it "3D"? And if you want to catalog different Unistrut sizes, all you'd have to do is apply parameters to the extrusion profile and map those parameters to the dimensional constraints, and bam! You have a flexible and fully parametric Unistrut family. Since Unistrut is a popular type of structural member, I'm pretty sure a little Google-ing would yield some results in a super Unistrut Family. I have my own that I've built but I only need one size so mine are not parametric, but it would be super easy to build one as long as you had the submittal PDF downloaded as reference. Quote
trmurphy Posted July 7, 2014 Author Posted July 7, 2014 thanks for the reply. i was afraid of that. problem with extrusions is they're not intelligent and this is a lot of strut and support steel that needs to be scheduled. i have a full unistrut family loaded in but i cant make a family out of a group of these. i have been messing around with it and it seems groups is the way forward as these are editable in the drawing like blocks (ie change one and they all change). not on revit long still learning the ropes! Quote
tzframpton Posted July 7, 2014 Posted July 7, 2014 Hmmm... I think you may be taking a wrong approach. The "extrusion" is not the intelligent part, it's the Family as a whole. And you most certainly can group these into a nested Family. It seems like you want some super-BOM scheduling is what I'm gathering from your latest post. If this is the case, can you provide a detailed example of what you're wanting to accomplish? Quote
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