Introduction

So thanks everyone for joining. We are gathered here today because dealing with equipment families in Revit is one of the top three, in my opinion, sources of friction, production bottlenecks, and heartburn in our particular niche of the industry. The out of the box families are almost useless. The stuff you get from manufacturers is pretty hit or miss. Sometimes it's good. It tends to be very specific. You can't customize it. It's often hyper complicated. Sometimes it's a 100 megabytes because they modeled the threads, and it makes your drawings look bodged together. And the time the time it takes to scar the Internet to find or wait for rep to get back to you is too much.

And then like building your own families from scratch is a whole thing, and there's not really any good learning resources to do it. We don't really often have time to create our own families from scratch every time we decide to go with a slight variation in in equipment. So I've been dealing with this stuff since 2009 when I got dropkicked in the deep end of the river pool. And this webinar is about what I've come up with for the best response to the circumstance, which is to, a, develop a foundational set of family creation skills to become familiar with the family editor environment, and then to create a kit of parts, a set of components, LEGO bricks, if you will, that I can use to put together any kind of family that I want rapidly. So even if it's deadline day and I'm over caffeinated and I didn't sleep well last night and I've gotta go pick up the kids and I don't have kids, but you know what I mean.

But, like, I can just get it done rapidly, quickly, and get it over with. This session is all about learning those skills and becoming comfortable working with that kit of parts. This is all about geometry. Next session, tomorrow's session, is going to be about shared parameters, equipment families, all that sort of stuff. So we're not going to get into any of that today.

We're just going to do the geometry stuff today. We have a lot of ground to cover. As I said in my email, I don't recommend that you try to follow along or copy me like this is a tutorial. I'm going to be moving fairly quickly to cover all the material. I'll be sending this recording after this after the call, and I recommend that as soon as possible after this that you take that recording and work through with the exercises that I listed out and try to actually do the things.

So you've already got all of this stuff. This is the the file I just sent to you. So you've got all this stuff together. You could choose to just take this stuff and learn how to use it and not go through the exercises, But I I think you would only get about 60% effectiveness of what you would be as a Revit operator if you took the time to go through the the skills that we're gonna be covering in this webinar and really learn at a deep level what's going on under the hood. Because even if you don't need to create another family from scratch, knowing how to do so are the fundamental skills you need to be able to rapidly modify them to suit for whatever it is that you need to do.