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Thread: Converting a family?

  1. #1
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    Default Converting a family?

    Hi All,

    I have downloaded a split type indoor unit from a manufacturer website. The family is in mechanical equipment category and not face/wall hosted, just freefloating on a ref level.

    Is there any way to convert this to a face hosted family so I can attach it to the linked architectural revit walls in my main project?

    I found a way but it has limitations. I created a new generic face hosted family and inserted my downloaded family into it as a nested family. Although it became a face hosted family this way, the pipe connections does not show in my main revit file because of a nested family.

    I have managed to convert a wall hosted family into a face hosted family previously. Likewise, is there a way to convert regular family to a face hosted one or do you have to make this decision at the start of creating the family?

    Thanks in advance

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    Default Re: Converting a family?

    I'm not a Revit Family expert, so hopefully someone else out there will chime in with a better response, but I believe the short answer is NO. I believe it really depends on what Template was used to create the Family, so you could theoretically rebuild the Family using a face-based Template. Yes? No? Not sure really, haven't done it myself, but I'm pretty sure you don't want to insert the existing Family "as is" into a face-based Family template. How did you convert a wall-hosted Family into a face-based Family?

    Maybe the more-appropriate questions is why would you want too? Using hosted Families are not always recommended in MEP...especially for mechanical equipment. For this particular application, my suggestion would be to set the elevation (Offset) you need in the Properties, and simply "constrain" the unit to the wall using a dimension of zero. Lock and delete the dimension, but leave the constraint behind. Your equipment will move with the wall and your job is done

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    Default Re: Converting a family?

    If the downloaded family was built to be hosted specifically to a Wall/Floor/Celing, it could be converted to a Face-Based family via a work-around method. However, if the Family has been created to be hosted by a Plane, I don't think that there is any way to convert it to a Face-Based family.

    If you are hard-pressed to make it Face-Based, then perhaps you should follow your embedding method and recreate the Connectors in the host family. You would also have to recreate the driving Parameters for the Connector and link the nested families parameter values to those.

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    Default Re: Converting a family?

    You can convert wall based family to face hosted by using copy/monitor tool. There are tutorials on that one.
    It seems that for my problem you have to decide at the start of family creation when selecting the family template.

    I thought there must be a easy way of converting level based to face hosted as it sounded easy. After all why should you have to redraw all the geometry and parameters in order to just to change it to face based? Or am I assuming something wrong here?

    Thanks all

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    Default Re: Converting a family?

    To convert a Generic Model Family to Face Based is as you describe. You'll need to re-create the connectors and "link" the nested parameters to new parameters in the new family. Linking parameters also helps if you want to flex the nested family.

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