Beam Family Question

[djn]

I have noticed that Revits default beam families were all created using a profile and sweeping that along a path, instead of creating an extrusion. Does anyone know if there is a reason for this or that is just the way the developers did it? One thought that I had was that Revit might look at these profiles when exporting an analysis program like ETABS. If this is the case then it would be good know so that when I want to create a new family I can follow the same procedure.

[Steven Campbell]

I have noticed that Revits default beam families were all created using a profile and sweeping that along a path, instead of creating an extrusion. Does anyone know if there is a reason for this or that is just the way the developers did it? One thought that I had was that Revit might look at these profiles when exporting an analysis program like ETABS. If this is the case then it would be good know so that when I want to create a new family I can follow the same procedure.A sweep was used to facilitate rotating the beam, it is much easier to rotate a sweep then extrusion due to the built in angle parameter in profile based sweeps.

Steve

[djn]

Thanks for the response that helps. On a related issue does anyone know how they got the loaded profile to flex with their reference planes in the beam family types? In trying to keep consistent I am building a beam from a profile, so I created the profile, loaded it into the beam family, but it doesn't flex with the reference planes in the family. It stays the original size it was created, and if I lock it the reference plane I get a constant error message.

[tinkerr]

You need to lock the profile to the reference planes while in sketch mode.

[djn]

What I did was create my own profile and then loaded it into a copy of the concrete beam family with the additional parameters and reference planes I needed. When I did this it won't let me lock to the profile to the reference planes. It seems like in the default concrete beam family the parameters are somehow nested to the concrete beam profile, but I can't seem to be able to figure out how to do that. Here is a copy of the Post Tension Beam Family I have been trying to create. Any help would be greatly appreciated.