Aligning/Locking Nested Elements To the Same Plane

[nelssimpp]

I am laying out an Insulated-Panel family for metal buildings. These panels will be used in a curtain wall system, which will represent the exterior surface for wall and roof panels. The panels will consist of an inside-skin, outside-skin, and a core.

I have successsfully developed the profiles and extruded them to a specific length. Also, when I load the individual-elements as curtain wall panels they react as true curtain wall panels in that they scale to size based on the height of the grid opening (So Far So Good).

However, when I nest the individual-elements to create a composite/nested-panel family the nested version of the panels will only insert at the fixed height that the individual element families were originally extruded.

I have tried to use the align command with multiple option to lock the individual elements to top and bottom planes, but I keep getting a 'Constriants' error. The error occurs even though there are no constraints applied to the individual components. As a result the nested panel does not resize as a group.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Scott Wilson]

Have you tried creating a parameter in your main family and linking that to your nested family to control its dimensions? I have found that approach works much better with nested families than constraining them to reference planes.