Create Nested Box and Add to Magic RTU

Let's get into some of the magic parts because we've learned how to make a box. Most people know how to make a box. The magic happens when you learn the next step, which is we're gonna make a nestable family and start creating our actual kit of parts. So let's get going. We're going to I'm gonna select the type parameter magic box that I've got right here. So we'll go into edit family. And what's that? Okay. So here we are. I need to do a save as.

I'm gonna make a magic RTU file. Save as magic. We're gonna call this magic RTU. Alright. So I've got my magic RTU, and the first thing I need to do is get out of this and make make my my mess nestable extrusion.

So if you remember at the very beginning when I was playing around with my three d with my three d RTU, and I I was moving those duct connectors. Those were basically just magic boxes, but they're face hosted, face based magic boxes. That's what made them sticky. So I'm going to make that now, and I'm gonna go a little bit faster than the first one because you've already seen me make a box. But I need to go to file, new, family, English Imperial, and then I need to go to generic model face based.

The reason I can't go to mechanical model face based is because they don't have one. That's mechanical equipment right there. It's not an option. You have to start with generic model face based, and then you can convert it into a mechanical device. Same thing if you were doing this for plumbing equipment or anything else. So I hit okay. Very first thing I need to do is hit save as. File, save as. And I'm my naming convention for families that I'm going to nest is to keep it all lowercase. I'm gonna call this extrusion rectangle.

And then this box right here, this is not an extrusion. This is not geometry. This rep oops. This represents let's go to the three d view in here. This represents the hosted element, the the face that it's gonna get hosted upon. And so same deal. We're just gonna make reference planes to represent a box. So RP reference planes, I'm gonna draw four. Again, I'm gonna go fast because you already saw this. DI.

Click, click, click. Constrain it. So I know that this is going I'm this I'm gonna use this as a duct connector. And when you talk about ducts, you don't think you don't talk about length and width. You talk about height and width. Right? So this one is going to be the name of this parameter is going to be width, and it's gonna be an instance type. And instance type is kind of confusing, isn't it? It's gonna be an instance parameter. This one is going to be height instance. K. And then let me just flex it real quick. Yep. Yep. Okay.

And then I'm gonna create my extrusion. You're gonna notice in this one, I'm not creating a parameter for the height of it because I don't need to it, because I know I don't need to. We can talk about that more in a second. I'm gonna create my extrusion rectangle. Oops. See, I'm I missed, And it doesn't that's okay. I can I don't need to redo that? I just use the align tool to go around and get those. Okay. And then I'm gonna set the extrusion end to I call this thickness in this in this dimension.

We're gonna hit okay and finish. Okay. So now I've got my duct extrusion, and I'm going to load into project and close. And I'm gonna load it into my family. I'm gonna load it into my magic RTU family, not the project. And I hit okay, and I don't need to save that. And now Revit is gonna let me stick it to any face that I want. And for this one, it's kind of an RTU. I'm gonna stick it here. And you can see that Revit Revit has it pointing in the wrong direction.

Not a big deal. You just select it, and you click the flipped work plane, and it it flips where it's going. And now that nested family lives in this family down here, generic models extrusion rectangle. So if I wanted to place another instance, I could just click and drag and put another one, you know, wherever I wanted it to go. The other thing here is that you notice that this is an orangish color, and this is a blackish color.

That's because this is still a generic model class of equipment. Remember, we started it as a generic model, and I forgot to change it to mechanical equipment. So I'm gonna change this back to mechanical equipment, go into edit family, And up here in this button, family category and parameters, click that, and you can just change it over to mechanical equipment. They're load it back into the project. You k.

Don't need to save and override the existing version. And now it's mechanical category equipment as well. Okay. And so now I want to get the parameters mapped. So if I click on if I click on this, I can change the parameters here. So the height say the height is a foot, and the width is two foot, and the thickness is one inch. Okay. So this being the front let me make this unit not a cube anymore. So I'm gonna delete that. I'm gonna call this type a, and the length let's make the length something reasonable.

Height four, width four. Okay. Keeps us a little oriented better. So the way that this extrusion came in, the height this is the narrow dimension, and the width is this long dimension. I actually want it flipped 90 degrees from this, and I can just hit space bar, and that will rotate it in the direction I want.

You know, that just makes sense to my brain that that's that's the way the height and width goes. Okay. So we've got that, and this isn't very useful so far because I can change the dimensions here in the family, but I can't change the dimensions if I were to push this into my project. So let's get it pushed in. So here we go.

This is my magic RTU to date. But if I click this, there's no place for me to change the parameters for how big that duct is, not in instance, not in type. I can't do it. So we've gotta go back in the edit family, and we've gotta create parameters that exist in the RTU level of the family and map them to the parameters that control the dimension of this extrusion. And we can do that really simple just here so we can directly map them.

So this is gonna be the return air connector, the return air duct connection. So I click that. I say new parameter. I'm gonna call this r a dot on height. I do want it to be a type parameter. I say okay. And same same for the width. Alright. Depth upon width. K.

And the thickness, which is just this dimension, I typically don't assign a parameter to it. I just leave it alone because one inch is fine. I don't really feel like I need a a lot of I'm not gonna be changing that very often. If I really need to, I can come into the family and change it hard coded, but I don't need an extra parameter in my project environment to mess around with. So now I can load this into the project, and I can go to edit type in here.

I've got myreturn.com height and width, and I can change these. So let's change this to three foot. There we go. So that's working. So now I can control the dimension, but I can't control the location yet. And so I wanna create parameters so that I can, you know, put this put this wherever I actually want it to go. Alright. Back to the family editor. You know, locate this. So I I do have an option here if for maximum flexibility, I'm gonna create parameters to give it an x and y location.

I can put it anywhere I want. If I knew that I was gonna use this particular family for a particular equipment where the duct connections were symmetric, aka, like, in the middle, it it would just be easier on my brain if I could just snap this to that, which, of course, I can. So I'm gonna go AA for a line. I'm going to click the center line there and then mouse over the duct extrusion, and it's gonna reference the reference plane that's in the nested family. And I can just lock that family there.

So then I could create a parameter that says, you know, how what is distances here, but I don't have to mess with the the left and right. I'm only gonna do that if I'm creating a family that I know the duct connectors are always gonna be symmetric. But if it is, that's, you know, easy. I don't have to do math in my head, which I'm pretty terrible at as you saw earlier. So I'm actually going to undo that.

I'm going to unconstrain them, and then I'm gonna create parameters to control the location. So DI again for create dimension. Gonna select the left reference plane, and then I'm gonna mouse over, and it's gonna give me that side of the duct connection. Gonna draw that up and select the parameter, create a new parameter, and this is gonna be RA on distance from left. And it's at this point that's a good time to discuss parameter naming.

One of my beefs with manufacturer equipment is often I'll go in and I'll I'll have a manufacturer's equipment, and I need to modify it. And every single parameter is like dim l, dim three, dim three dash l dash four, and it's like, I have no idea what this means. So I like to use sentences for my for my parameter names because Tyler in five years might come to this family or someone who's not name is not Tyler and need to figure out what in the heck is going on here, and it's just a favor to them to name it something that gives them a hope of being able to figure out what's going on in here. I do recommend that you don't use any dashes in any of your parameter names. It's not the end of the world, but Revit, if you use this parameter in a formula, Revit will see that dash as a negative sign, and it will not do what you want it to do.

You can get around that by putting it in brackets, but why even bother with that? Just don't use dashes. Okay. So we've defined that. And then DI, we can define the distance from the rear. And now you might be asking, you know, I'm I'm saying distance from left, distance from rear. Like, what if the cut sheet says something different? These are just based on looking at a lot of cut sheets, this is typically what I see. But, obviously, there's variations in how the manufacturers use their cut sheets. So you can either do math and figure out the dimensions that you want, or you can create new parameters based off of the side of the cut sheet that you're looking at is basing it off of.

But this one seems like the most common reference size for these. This is where our our distance from rear. K. And now I'm gonna flex it. So our icon distance from left. Let's make that a foot. Alright. That works. Distance from rear. Let's make that six inches. Alright. Cool. So that's working, and we've got our RA. Let's make our SA. So I've got this selected.

I'm just gonna hit CS for create similar. Gonna hit tab, space bar rather, to rotate it the way I want it and place it there. And, again, Revit helpfully stuck it inside, so I'm just gonna flip it back out to be an Audi and select it and map some parameters. So this is exactly what I just did for the RA. Just gonna do it for supply supply supply supply air supply air height.

Apply air width. Alright. So that's mapped, and then I wanna give it some locators. This is distance here. This one's gonna be let's say, distance from right.

Okay. So now I can load this into the project, and I am gonna override existing frames. Alright. I'll go here. Open up. So you can see what I'm doing. Alright. And I'm just gonna test it. So type a. Let's say, s a distance from right. Let's say that's actually four foot, and let's say the distance from rear is two inches. Apply. Okay. I say distance from left is four inches, and distance from rear is one foot. Okay.

Everything's working. Yeah. Don't want it to look not to look bad. Okay. Cool. Alright. So those are working. But you might notice something you can't actually draw a duct off of this. We haven't we've created the geometry for the duct connection, but we haven't actually created the duct connector, the thing where you can right click and say draw a duct. That's the next step, and that's where things start to get really fun.