Selectable, Invisible, Not Even There

[antman]

I am working on door families and am running into some frustrating behavior. The left and right reference planes become selectable out to the extents of whatever is in the door family (geometric or symbolic). The side reference planes only extend a couple inches out from the wall. The result of this is that doors are accidentally selected on a regular basis. The OOTB doors exhibit the same behavior. Is there any way to change this?

[jeffh]

You can try changing the refernce plane to "not a reference" or "weak reference" in the properties of the reference plane in the family editor. You may also have to remove the name (I think named reference planes are "strong references" by default. This will make the referecne plane "invisible" once the door is loaded into the project. They will still function as a skeleton to drive geometry and constrain things to in the family editor.

[antman]

They were already unnamed weak references, but 'not a reference' did the trick. Thanks Jeff!

[CADMama]

I have a family that has that same problem. It keeps getting selected when I am not near it. I can be 10' or more away selecting something and that little bugger will jump in the selection set.
I need to have reference planes to dimension to and line things up but every time one is Weak or Strong - anything besides NOT - it happens.
I don't know the origin of this family. It is a piece of equipment I need to have.

[CADastrophe]

Can you attach the Family here, Donnia?

[CADMama]

Sure. can you beat it out of it and I will pay you the same as last time.

[MikeJarosz]

I don't know the origin of this family.


One of the observations I have made of human behavior since computers have entered the workplace is the attitude that copied work is perfection. I guess we are so relieved to have saved all that work, we want to believe that nothing could possibly be wrong with a copy and anything I would have done on my own would necessarily be inferior.

Of course, the other side of our brain is telling us this is not true. Some evil genius buried a virus inside that great Revit family I found online of a red Jaguar that I plan to park in front of the project I'm working on. Can't wait for the raytrace to finish!

I think it is a good idea to be skeptical of families that come from anywhere but the manufacturer. Even then be careful. Open up a residential window family from one of the big guys. You'll find more formulas than Einstein's blackboard.

Why is my drawing so slow? The electric range I downloaded has all the insides modeled, right down to three wire racks. All it needed was a pan of brownies.

Interesting point Jeff - naming a reference plane makes it strong.

[CADastrophe]

Sure. can you beat it out of it and I will pay you the same as last time.

After administering a severe beating, I think there is a level of corruption with this Family file, and I think I may have encountered this anomoly before. I believe that your best course of action here is to start a new Family File and copy/paste the Lines and the Extrusions. Since there are no dimensional constraints attached to those Reference Planes, there should be no significant repercussions to this. You'll have to recreate all of your Parameters, but that's not a big deal here, it seems.

*One of the strange observations I made here was that the Ref. Level View was set to "Cropped" for some reason, but that doesn't seem to be the cause.

[CADMama]

I had cropped the view - I was doing anything I could to put it back in the box.

The joy of starting a new job - getting to find all the fun stuff in their box of toys!