Creating Connectors

[jtolley]

I am a very new user of Revit MEP, as in my second week, and I am having trouble creating a family for a fire protection pre-action system cabinet. I am trying to keep it as simple as possible with a fire connection in and out and a drain connection. I placed connectors for the inlet water connection, the outlet water connection, and the drain connection but when I load the family and try to place the object I cannot connect piping to the connectors, the connectors are not visible at all. I am attaching the family file in hopes that someone can point me in a direction to fix this. Also, are there any tutorials out there that start from scratch and create a very simple family. All of the tutorials I have found start with an existing family and modify from there. Any help would be appreciated.

[Martin Figlarz]

I am really surprised no one has posted one comment here... no one out there knows how to create a family?!?!?
Or has any tutorials for getting started for a new guy.

[Andre Carvalho]

OK

So this is Mike Hardy-Brown's Basic Family Creation Tutorial. It shows the basic family creation from scratch.

I hope it helps. And if it does, thanks Mike.

Andre Carvalho

[Martin Figlarz]

Thanks a lot ... that is good stuff.

[Misteracad]

OK

So this is Mike Hardy-Brown's Basic Family Creation Tutorial. It shows the basic family creation from scratch.

I hope it helps. And if it does, thanks Mike.

Andre Carvalho

Definitely good stuff. Thanks for posting it Andre, and thanks to Mike for compiling it! It's sharing like this that ultimately helps grow the Revit community and gets us newbies up-to-speed quicker. Cheers :beer:

[mabrey]

jtolley:

I looked at your family and other than one connector pointing in the wrong direction (arrow always points to the connecting pipe, and direction is controlled in the properties), I couldn't find any major problems. I flipped the connector and loaded it into a new project and as you can see in the attached image, was able to pipe to it. Just select the family, right click on one of the blue connectors and select "draw pipe." Hit the spacebar to match the offset and size of the connector and click a second location to draw your pipe.

-Jon