Creating Revit Family Files completely in Revit

[brad10104]

Hello! I am just starting to learn Revit. My employer would like me to create some Revit Family Files that show our equipment and the MEP Connection points. We did this previously out of house, but now we are trying to do it in-house. I was taking our STEP Files, doing all the work in Autodesk Inventor, and then exporting the files to as a .rfa, however, we have gotten some feedback that this is not what is desired by our customers. Has anyone ever made any families based off of a step file or can someone point me in the correct direction to get started?

[david_peterson]

They can be done and what you've described is the correct process for that workflow.
But as a Revit user, I'll tell you that those families aren't very good. They work for taking up the correct amount of space and such, but you can't apply materials to them and they don't tend to cut correctly. But the only way to get them to function like true Revit Families is to generate them 100% in Revit and your boss isn't going to like that.
I like clean families with no Cad or other imported objects. They tend to be safer in the long run.

[CAtDiva]

They can be done and what you've described is the correct process for that workflow.
But as a Revit user, I'll tell you that those families aren't very good. They work for taking up the correct amount of space and such, but you can't apply materials to them and they don't tend to cut correctly. But the only way to get them to function like true Revit Families is to generate them 100% in Revit and your boss isn't going to like that.
I like clean families with no Cad or other imported objects. They tend to be safer in the long run.

Yeah. I downloaded a detail component from a manufacturer the other day, only to discover it was an imported CAD file. I reverted to an in-house generic component instead. Maybe I'll eventually refine it to match their wall panel profile, but for now my detail has the base information it needs.

[brad10104]

David,

Thanks for your response. Do you know of any tutorials or YouTube videos that go through the process of creating Revit Families 100% in Revit?

Thanks once again for all the help everyone!