Dormers

[Paul Monsef]

just curious...

I'm working on a design with (8) sets of dormers that are exactly the same. It seems kinda silly to draw this 8 times and groups never work.

Should i create this entire dormer as a generic model? or just Copy, Mirror and FIX?? It seems like it could be a lot of work creating a family for something as complex as this, but i could be wrong.

[sbrown]

The "right" way is to create the dormer(walls, roofs, windows) then group it and copy the group around, now a word of caution groups don't always behave well, so you may end up use the group to copy the element around and if it works great, if you run into problems, just ungroup the problem instance.

You thought of using the family editor is a good one, you could do it there and use multiple sub categories for walls windows roofs, etc. This would take a little longer to create a family that did everything you want it to.

[PeterJ]

Using a roof hosted family you could nest in the window and I suppose the shutters giving you a dormer family that you could repeat at will and which would update across all instances if you edited the family and reloaded.

Alternatively, the suggestion that seems to come from AU and the reports of various wise people speaking there is that you could make the dormer as a project in its own right and then make it a linked project, which again, I believe, could be copied again and again.

[Paul Monsef]

Thanks!!

I would have never thought of linking an rvt file... I think that might actually work here seeing that i do not need to schedule anything in the dormer.

I ended up, grouping, copying and mirroring to get the dormers populated. BUT. I fear change!! and of course i had to ungroup each instance and fudge, fudge, fudge... SO. I think it's fine for now, but next time.

maybe we need a SaveAsFamily routine. hum....

[beegee]

Paul,

The AU 03 idea of linking an rvt file, in this case containing a dormer, sounds good, except that I don't think you could then schedule or tag the windows within the master project. ( Or does R6.0 change that, he added... hopefully )

I know you said you didn't need to, but normally that would be SOP.

Can any of you AU chaps (/ess's) expalin how that would work ?

[gregcashen]

I don't think any new functionality was added to allow this, so I think you're right beegee.