Balconies: group vs. family

[damon.sidel]

I'm working on a residential tower. 62 stories of condos, each with one or more balcony. All the balconies are the same configuration, but there are three different lengths. They are super simple right now: floor slab, railing (glass for now), and a railing-height concrete planter. On a previous project, we created a similar balcony as a generic family. It worked very well and since we weren't doing CDs, we didn't have to worry about schedules. We also had terraces on that project. Those we did as groups and got into trouble because we built the planters with walls. One wall on each terrace also had a profile. We got all sorts of errors and had a lot of trouble copying them. However, we had the ability to schedule things as walls, floors, and railings quite easily.

So for this new project, I ask you for your opinion: balconies as a group or a family?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

I like the family option but, as always, it depends what you want and what you need.
Scheduling, tagging, display control, clean up at interface between family and wall...
The drawbacks are that whatever rail and planter walls you may have won't be 'native' in their object categories but as long as everyone understands that it can work out just fine. On the flip side a family with all the wall, rail geometry will most likely be more efficient than grouped real elements and with three configurations you could probably make it one family, three types.