Revit door & window families - No surrounding frames

[PRSS]

Hello

I have Building Design Suite Premium 2015.

I am learning Revit only now. I am in India. We mostly use wooden doors & windows for residential buildings.
And all of them would have solid 4 inches x 3 inches frame that holds the shutters. The frames are fixed in walls.

I do not find families in Revit that have these type of doors. And here in India, there would not be any floor plate for the door.
Do we have to create every type of family required ourselves ?

In that case family creation itself would eat up so much of time that the project gets delayed for want of appropriate family.
And most of the components / families I find in Revit are only generic. One could not extract an enlarged detail - say of door joining
the wall or even an enlarged door frame detail extracted from the model.

Or an enlarged sectional detail of some other component - extracted from the BIM model. Unless the Revit model has
all the intricate details, one could not extract the enlarged detail from the model.

Here the Revit Training centers are saying that those details could be drawn in CAD - which I feel defeats the purpose of using Revit.

So do you all out there create Revit families for every project? Autodesk seems to have given us very little library through Revit
whereas Autocad Architcture seems to have such highly detailed components with a large library.

I feel as far as components / families are concerned AutoCAD Architecture has plenty of highly detailed and easily configurable
(parametric) ready made components available within the software itself.

So please tell me how you mange in Revit - for highly detailed components / families ? (OR is AutoCAD Architecture superior to Revit?)

Thanks in advance.
PRSS

[PRSS]

Hello

No replies so far. Did I ask a stupid question ?

[Wanderer]

Hello

No replies so far. Did I ask a stupid question ?

I'll move this from the Revit in Practice forum to the families forum, maybe you'll get better replies there.

Cheers.

[dkoch]

As nice as it would be to have all of the content you need provided out-of-the-box, that is probably not a realistic expectation, given the wide range of ways similar things (like doors and windows) are done in various areas, as well as the wide range of graphics employed for showing those things (even by two firms in the same area, showing the exact same items). If I recall correctly, we did not find the out-of-the-box door families and graphics suitable, and created custom families for both the graphics and to get the schedules to work the way we wanted. That does involve some up-front effort, but once you have a library of families established, they can be used over and over again.

As for detailing, we do not model our door and window families to the extent that we can create a 3" = 1'-0" (1:5) jamb or head detail from the model. Nor do we do so in AutoCAD Architecture - we currently use both programs. The Revit model has enough graphic detail to generate the contract documents, generally not viewed at a scale larger than 1/4" = 1'-0" (1:50). On selected projects, in selected areas, there may be more detail to support other uses, such as renderings. In order to keep the models workable, we try to avoid adding detail that will not show to the model itself. I believe this is common practice.

That said, most of the detail drawings for Revit projects are done in Revit. We are still in the process of porting all of our standard details from AutoCAD to Revit; the most often used details have been done, so there are not many projects using both programs to generate sheets.

Note that the above comments apply to an architectural practice focused primarily on commercial and institutional work, not residential.

[PRSS]

Thank you very much Melannie Perry for moving the thread to the appropriate place. That was a great help. I appreciate it.

And thank you David Koch for your detailed explanation. This was what I wanted from this forum and you have given it. I also note your last point "not residential" implying lots more custom families have to be created by me.

I shall take it that my questions have been answered.

Thanking you all once again
With best regards
PRSS

[Steve_Stafford]

You'll also find that the library for North America contains simpler families for doors and windows. There are content libraries for other regions throughout the world. You'll find the UK, Australian and French content, for example, have more detail like for frames and hardware.

[PRSS]

Thank you Steve for the tips. And I forgot to ask one question to David Koch. For details that are more than a scale of 1" = 4"-0" (or 1:50) , how do you extract the enlarged details from them? Do you do them in CAD or use the Line tool in Revit to draft out the details (which in that case would not be an intelligent Revit object). So are you using some kind of hybrid system to produce detailed drawings - a mixture of Revit & AutoCAD ?

I am asking these questions because I had always been thinking that every little details is extracted from the Revit model & only some touch-ups with the 2d line tool are done. Am I then wrong? Sorry for bothering again.

OR using Revit in my very small office (It is only myself as the Architect & 4 diploma draftspersons which is my small Office Home office) - IS IT AN OVERKILL ? Again I am yet to implement it in my office. OR do you all feel it might not be worthwhile using only one copy of Revit (BDSP suite) and the other staff using AutoCAD LT? Please advise. I would not be able to afford another license for BDSP 2015.

Thanks in advance
PRSS

[Steve_Stafford]

You can work either way, deriving details from actual model views or "drafting" details in drafting views with lines, symbols and components. You can also embed extra detail in families, using detail level to determine when it should be visible. The more repetitious your work is or how often you can reuse design detail helps decide how far to take the effort. The more you can reuse something the more you'll benefit from creating things that can be reused, such as families with embedded sill, jamb and head details or drafting views of standard conditions that can be shared among projects more easily than drafting details over live section views in an individual project.

[dkoch]

The way a detail is created depends on the type of detail. If there is a project-specific condition that requires a large-scale detail, and modeled elements are a significant part of the detail, then the detail may start out with a plan or section callout. Some model elements, such as interior partitions or structural elements, will have enough modeled detail to contribute significant graphics to the final result, but may still require additional embellishment. Other items, such as door frames, will only have simple geometry modeled, to generate smaller scale plan or section graphics. We would typically start with a model view of the condition, but would add detail components, filled regions and/or linework to the view to complete the detail.

We also have a large library of "standard" details, which are separate from the model of any particular project, but which cover things that are used on multiple projects and show detail beyond that which is necessary to have at each modeled item to which it applies. For example, our interior door frames are typically hollow metal. We show the frame in plan as a simple rectangle, usually flush with the face of the hosting Wall, even though in reality the frame projects 1/2" beyond the face of the partition on each side, and has an integral door stop that projects into the nominal door opening. We do not model the actual door frame at each door, relying, instead, on a drafting view that shows each jamb condition, which also shows how the frame connects to the various partition types.

That library of details started out as hand-drawn details (that were copied onto clear acetate and taped up on a mylar title block carrier sheet, in the really old days), and then were migrated to AutoCAD. We are in the process of migrating those to Revit details, and, as previously noted, have the most commonly used details in Revit already. The intent is to eventually to have them all in Revit and maintain them there, and export from Revit to AutoCAD for those projects that are done in AutoCAD. In the mean time, if a project needs a detail that is only available in AutoCAD, then the project team or the Design Technology support staff will convert the detail to Revit. On occasion, if there is an entire sheet of details that is currently only in AutoCAD, the team may choose to create that sheet in AutoCAD. This is becoming less necessary as the migration of details to Revit proceeds.

All of which is a long way to say that even in a project done 100% in Revit, it is not necessary (and, depending upon the project size, not desirable) to model every last thing that shows in the contract documents. I do not think moving your practice from AutoCAD to Revit is overkill, but I cannot speak to whether your proposed use of both Revit LT and Revit would be a workable workflow. We only have Revit, not Revit LT, as we need the ability to have multiple users working on nearly every project, at some point, if not during the entire process. If you typically only have one person working on a given project at a time, then the worksharing capability of Revit may not be necessary, and Revit LT may work for you.

[PRSS]

Thank you very much for your detailed reply David Koch. It covers & clears all my doubts & apprehensions. Now it is only up to me as to how to go about it. You have clearly said that it is not desirable to model the entire project with intricate details. I was under the impression that one is supposed to do detailed model of every little thing in Revit and I was also under the impression that, that was the only correct way of using Revit - I had also thought that people in other countries did so. May be it was diluted in India. Well, that doubt is cleared now. One doesn't need to necessarily model every little detail in Revit. So we can be a bit flexible.

Best regards
PRSS