Make a Magic Box

What we're going to do next is we're going to make the most simple family that we might need, which is a box. So we're gonna create a new family. We're gonna go to file, new family, and I'm gonna go to English imperial, and I'm gonna go down to the mechanical equipment style. I'm not gonna choose either the ceiling or wall based. I'm pretty anti hosting.

So I'm gonna go with mechanical equipment. And the very first thing I'm gonna do is save it. So my naming convention is something like m DashMagicBox. I'm gonna call it instance, and I'm also gonna add one for session one so I can be clear on what I'm doing here. And so the the main thing to understand with family creation is that it's mostly what you're doing is you're creating what's called reference planes, and the dimensions that you use to control the parameters of your families, the size and everything, you're actually controlling those reference planes.

The three d objects, the extrusion, the boxes, the cylinders, you lock those to the reference planes. So it all starts with the reference plane. To start with that, this is a magic box. So we're gonna start a box, and I'm gonna start with those reference planes. So I hit RP, and I'm gonna loosely draw four reference planes.

I don't have to be very precise with it because we're gonna use math and stuff to drive. So I've got my reference planes, and now I need to I want these to be symmetric around the these crosshairs here. So these two reference planes that started, these are the front back. Front's down here, back's up here, left is here, right is here. Reference planes. So this is center left to right. This is center front back. And I want this to be the dead center of my family, and I want my reference points to be equidistant around it. So to do that, I use the align dimension tool, which is a shortcut DI. It's the align tool right there.

I'm gonna click left, right, and then center, and it matters in which order you did that. It matters that the center is the last one you click. And then I'm gonna click up and away, and you'll see it says e q, and it has a slash through it. I'm gonna click that slash, and what that does is it constrains these reference planes to be equidistant. So if I move these, the the other one moves as well to be equidistant. So I do the same thing. DI, click, click, click, and then click away. Equidistant. And these are equidistant now as well. And then I will want to create parameters to drive the length.

It's gonna be in this direction, width in this direction, and then height is gonna be in the vertical direction. So I hit DI, and I click the left and then the right. You can click the right and then the left. It doesn't matter. Click again, and I'm gonna do the same here.

And then to create a parameter that drives that drive will control the geometry, I select this dimension, and I come up here to the ribbon, and I say create parameter, this button right here. And I'm gonna call this clip length, and I'm gonna make this an instance parameter. Then we're gonna we're gonna talk about the diff the difference between type and instance. Clip length and this one, again, select the select the dimension, come up here, create parameter, with width instance. Okay.

And then I also wanna come into a front zone elevation view, and I'm gonna create another reference plane RP and draw one. And here is so I wanna create another parameter that defines the height of this geometry of of my magic box. You'll notice that there are two sets of planes here. There's what's called the reference level. And then if you so I've just moused over.

And then if you tab, you'll see that there's a there's a reference plane, and there's a reference level. And you can select either one. You wanna reference off of the reference plane, not the reference level. So, again, DI, mouse over, and then I'm going to tab select to the reference plane and select that and select create parameter, equip height instance. Okay. Okay. So now I have my reference planes, but this is still there's still basically nothing here. There's nothing I can use. There's no box. So let's create the box.

The way you create geometry in Revit is to create extrusions. So you come to the create tab. We click extrusion. There's different shapes and types you want. 90% of all I mean, more than 90% of all the families I do is just an extrusion of some of that box type, then you can pick what kind of shape you want to do.

So we're gonna go with rectangle tool, and then I want to mouse over the intersection of these two reference planes and click once and then make sure that I've got both of these intersect reference planes highlighted here and click again. And then before I click anything, you'll notice that there's these open padlocks. It's saying that like, hey, this is aligned with this reference plane, but it's not locked to it. And I can just click the padlocks and that will lock the geometry to those reference planes. Okay.

So I'm still in I've just drawn a I've drawn a rectangle to map here. Now I need to get the vertical direction, the z direction set, and the way to do that is to come into the properties, and it says extrusion start and end. And then there's a button to the right of the value field here, and I'm gonna click that. It's not obvious. And I'm gonna set that to equip height. And then I can hit the green check, and I can come to my three d view, and I can see that I have a box. And the the view cube will show you, like, what you're pointing at. So I'm this is the front. This is the left. This is the right over here.

Okay. So I've got I've got a box. I have made some progress here. The first thing you wanna do the first thing well, what you wanna do continuously as you're making families, this is best practice, is to flex the family as you go. So what does flexing mean? Well, I've just created parameters that drive this geometry. I'm gonna come up here. Let me emphasize this. You're gonna click this button a lot, the family types button. This is where all the parameters live. So I'm gonna click that, and I've got now access to the dimension parameters. So I can change the height, five. Change the height. That's the correct direction. Equipment length, let's make that two.

Okay. That's direction I thought length was and the width. I'm gonna make it two as well. And that is correct. That's behaving the way I I expected it to behave. So I'm I'm happy with that. So now I'm gonna push it into the project. And my preference when I'm modifying and working on families is to always do the load in a project and close button so that I don't get confused as to what values I'm setting for the parameters. It'll always ask you if you want to save the changes that you made to the family. I always say no because I'm not trying to save my family out to an external file as an RFA.

I keep my families in a project, whether that's in the warehouse or in the project I'm using. I don't want two sources of truth, so I'm not interested in saving it. That means it's gonna save it outside. So I say no to saving it, and I it's gonna let me push it in here. Might as well put it here.

And so here's my magic box, and it's got again, this has got instance parameters. And instance parameters just means that I could have two instances of the same type. So these are type well, it when you don't have multiple, it just says this. So, like, type one, there is just the one type, and each instance, even though it's the same type, can have totally different values for the parameters. Each one can be a completely unique little snowflake.