families in templates or as single files?

[Justin Marchiel]

I have been reading a few threads about people having problems with particular families, or schedules, etc. when upgrading. that got me thinking about upgrading families. when a new release comes out, if your families are not all located in your template you have to update each file.

So i am curious, how does everyone handle families? Are they all loaded into the template and just the template gets loaded, or do you have seperate files for walls, doors, componants, etc.? I would guess that if all this info is in the template it gets pretty large, but the benefit is that your users will look in the template for items before making none standard items first.

Opinions? In practice?

Justin

[davidcobi]

We like to keep our template small so we keep family files separate. We use Autodesk's Family Upgrade Utility when a new Revit version is released. We haven't had any problems upgrading families using this utility.

http://revit.autodesk.com/pillar/custserv/web/service/support_4.0/faq/Installation/2_installation.asp

[Justin Marchiel]

do your users know to look at the templates before creating new content? My problem is that a lot of time i am adding new things to the families. I tell them, but it is more than a month before they use the new items, so they forget and then try to rebuild it. I was thinking that if it was always in the template, at least new project would be up to date.

Now existing projects in another story...

Justin

[davidcobi]

We only keep simple doors and windows in our PROJECT template file. Most of our users know to look in our Revit Library for more specific content before trying to recreate it (probably because I'm always showing them new features found in our Revit Library). We have also recently added a few standard things to our door and window FAMILY templates. Everytime I install a new version of Revit I point the "default path for family template files" (under Settings... Options... File Locations) to these new templates in our revit library.