Over the years I have tried several ways to copy parameters from one family to another. I have created solids or reference planes added dimensions and then copied all of that to the clipboard, then pasted to another family, and deleted what was pasted. I have used Dynamo and other add in tools as well. This week I realized you can simply copy the dimension, then paste into the other family. No need to go back and delete everything as nothing will actually paste but the parameter names.
During my last Revit Radio session I was had made the comment that Material Assests can’t be purged out of a family. The discussion arose as I had found a bug in Revit 2017 that if you attempt to delete all the materials out of a family then Revit was just crashing. It didn’t do this on all families but specifically on View Title families, both OOTB and custom versions. Aaron Maller wrote in explaining me a work around to remove the material assest. This mornign I was gong to blog about his work around but wanted to first attempt to figure out why the family was crashing in the first place. My first troubleshooting thought was to purge the family and to my surprise we can now Purge material assests (This is huge for us content generating geeks). Not only that but it will allow us to purge all materials out of a family, it doesn’t leave default.
FYI purging the family of materials didn’t make it crash but deleting the material did. I stopped looking since this is a better option anyway.
Paul Aubin and I were having a discussion the other night about signage. It made me think of an age old process (age old for me at least) that I have been using since the early days of Revit and I thought I should share it. When placing signage on a corridor wall it would be nice to have the sign be able to pick up a room id from a given distance on the other side of the wall. As you may know that when scheduling an object it does know what space or room it is located in. In this example the sign would know it was in the corridor and not represent the room or space it is intended for. Families know their location in Revit by their insertion point, with hosted families the insertion point doesn’t have to be the face of the host. I know this sounds odd but the family will host to the face, but the reference plane that defines it’s insertion may be in front of or behind the host and that is the value Revit will see to report the Room it is located in. Yes Revit did introduce the “Room Calculation Point” tool in the family editor, but since it only goes a single direction and the distances aren’t adjustable it, in my opinion, is completely useless to me.
My solution was to add a reference plane behind the host surface (in this example the Host Back Face) and give that reference plane an instanced based parameter and set the “Is Reference” to weak and make sure the “Defines Origin” is selected. This way I can now drag the reference plane such that it is inside the room that I need the sign to schedule.
In the project example below I have also added a side offset such that I can place the signage in the corridor and get it to read any of the room data behind the wall.
This example has all the insertion points set to 0″ and it will read the Corridor.
This example I was able to drag the insertion point (Room Insertion Back Value) to get it to register the Closet
Then adjusting the Room Insertion Side value I can get it to schedule as Room 100
If you didn’t know about this trick hopefully it will inspire you to use it in other ways
For those of you who have been following my blog you know that I can get pretty particular when creating families. I always name my reference planes and define the “Is Reference” for example. Occasionally I have the need to create a section in the family and sometimes I want to have notes associated to the section such that I can reference why I created it. Yes we can change the name to give a description but what if the name becomes long or we need additional information. One tip I have is to use the “Title on Sheet” value to help in this situation.
While creating an extrusion in a family the other day I noticed a subtle change to the sketch lines. In Revit 2016 or prior when a sketch line was selected there was a property “Visible” which could be turned ticked off, or a parameter could be added to the variable. This did absolutely nothing for the sketch or the family. In Revit 2016 R2 this property value has been removed. Not a big deal but removing unnecessary values to objects does make things cleaner and less confusing.