Learn / Advanced Mechanical Equipment Workflow Videos
Convert to Type Based
Mechanical · Building Infinitely Customizable Mechanical Equipment Families · 3m
This lesson teaches you how to convert instance parameters to type parameters in Revit, specifically for mechanical equipment families. You'll learn to manage parameters effectively to streamline your design process.
Key topics include saving a family as type-based, editing parameter types, and understanding the implications of type versus instance parameters in equipment modeling. You'll also explore how these changes affect the behavior of your model in practical scenarios.
Transcript
Okay. So that's our that's our instance magic box with clearance zone. Now we would like that's fine, but we would like a magic box with type parameters. So we're just gonna do a save as on this one and convert the parameters to type parameters. Back to the family editor, do the save as, and this will be type.
And we go to the family types dialogue, and we select we're gonna select all these actually. Yeah. Each of these in turn and come down here to edit parameter button and just change it over to type. Here we go. Equipment height type.
And I'm gonna elect to keep the clearance visibility a instance parameter. Okay. K. And type load this into the project, and we place it. And the first thing we notice is that the drag handles are gone.
So if we click on the instance version, it's got drag handles. And on this one, the drag handles are gone. That's because we've changed all those dimension parameters to type. So now the type actually kind of matters. So so let's we if we wanna change those parameters, we come into the edit type thing here. Why don't we rename this to two foot cube? And then we'll create a duplicate we'll duplicate the type. I'll say this is a four foot cube, and we'll change these, oh, to four foot. And let's make that something a little bit more reasonable. Okay.
And we hit okay. So there's our four foot cube type. I'm gonna hit so what I did there is I have this selected. I hit CS for create similar, and I'm gonna paste that there. And I'm gonna change this to the two foot cube version.
And now these out of the way. And now if I create another I can create as many of these two foot cubes as I want. Let's create another four foot cube. And now if I come in here and I edit the dimensions of my two foot cube, so edit, and say I make this three feet, all of them became three foot because they are all members of the same type, and they all share the same properties. Whereas it is not the case with the instance parameter.
Any every single instance of the of this instance family that I change, it's going to change. It's a pretty important you know, the difference between instance and type parameters, it's easy enough when you're just looking at a box, when you're thinking about things like model numbers and capacity numbers and you start getting to mechanical equipment schedules. It's kind of a judgment call as to what you should use, but it does behoove you to really understand well what the instance and type parameters are doing in a family and why you would wanna use one versus the other.