Top 8 Best Practices for Creating Revit Families

Creating custom Revit families are one of the most important tasks in a firm that uses Revit extensively. Whether you are in charge of creating them in-house, or whether you are publishing them online changing the Revit landscape ? you will quickly see that there are some tricks to this matter. And for that, today, we will talk about top 8 best practices for creating Revit families.

Best practices to create Revit Families:

1. Keep it simple

Staying minimal is the key to your speed of creating Revit families. Whether you want to detail the level for elevations or represent a plan ? this is a very handy way, because in these kinds of matters unnecessary complications can boomerang, impacting your performance in a bad way. Utilizing symbolic lines and masking regions will help keep your map simple and minimal. Combine this with visibility settings to create Revit families that look simple and minimal but are incredibly powerful.

2. Know where to stop

Over-modeling is often what kills a 3D model ? not a healthy practice at all. You can minimize that using limits while creating assemblies and parts. This will help you to avoid overloading the model with all kinds of unnecessary junk. It is key to your best interests that you consider only the assemblies that you need and discard all else. This practice compliments the above "keep it simple" rule beautifully.

3. Try not to use complicated families

While creating customized families, it is vital to understand how complex families work. They are very useful indeed. However, every good thing has a dark side and, in this case, it is performance impact and unnecessary complications. Overuse of the following types of families can easily kill your model:

1. Nested
2. Detailed
3. Parameterized

Overuse of the above types of families in your model or family will complicate the product as you keep adding them; and at one point you may have to discard the whole thing out of sheer frustration It would be better to remain very frugal while using these types of families.

4. Avoid voids

Voids are of great use; indeed, sometimes they are the only way to make a model. However, they are performance eaters as well. When you're using too many voids in your family you will definitely get bogged down. So, it's best to avoid voids ? as much as you can. Try transparent solids before using voids.

5. Don't group, familiarize

More often than not it has been seen that groups are heavier than families. And for good reason too ? groups are unfiltered collection of things, but most families are built carefully using the above practices that make them lean and minimal. While it is true that most groups are much more powerful and detailed than similar families, we cannot simply ignore the time and processing power it requires to update everything in a group for every minor change you make. So, if you're looking for efficiency, go for families instead of groups.

6. Don't overuse formulas and arrays

Just like voids, arrays and formulas similarly bog your model down in mires of unnecessary heavy processing. A worse matter is that they are duplicated every time you use them, so that's a major performance hit right there. Avoid them as much as you can. If you need a simple array or formula, try doing them by hand.

7. Masks and symbols

Use masking symbols and symbolic lines anywhere you can. They reduce the model size and also its complexity. You can still give a detailed view using these materials while keeping the model size, complexity down, therefore the performance stays high.

8. Parametric not

All families in your work need not be parametric. While it is true that they are very useful, but they hog the processor power crazily. In order to keep your model snappy and fast you will have to decide where to must use a parametric family and where you can do without a parametric family.

Wrapping up

It is vital to keep up the model performance while you are creating custom Revit families. No one likes slow, CPU-breaking Revit families, be they your client or team. Using lightweight tools and objects cleverly is key to create detailed-looking Revit families while they are still efficient.

Moreover, you have to be very economical in using complex objects in your custom family. The reason for that is that while they are quite useful, they also are performance hogs that can botch your whole project if used recklessly.

That is why we have presented some of the best choices you should make while creating custom families. Following the above top 8 best practices for creating Revit families will be very useful for your BIM work.