Family merging with wall

[bill.92885]

I'm working on a residential project that required a simple decorative bracket be attached to a wall. I created the new family using a wall based generic model template, using solid form I created the pieces I needed for the bracket. Everything worked fine except when I load the bracket into my project and place it on the wall the bracket is pulled into the wall by a certain distance. I'd like the backet to appear on the face of the wall. Could someone tell me where I went wrong?

[Andre Carvalho]

You have to align and lock your bracket pieces to the wall face on the family. It's that simple!

Andre Carvalho

[aaronrumple]

You have to associate the geometry with the face of the wall - which will move based on wall thickness. You should check on this in the family by having Wall 1 and Wall 2. Someone made the location line at the face of the wall. This should be left to centerline. There is a ref. plane at the face of the wall. This should remain and be locked to the wall. There is another at the center of the wall. This should remain and be locked to the centerline of the wall. You have way too many ref. planes. You should only use those that are needed and be sure to name and set their properties. You can keep the geometry moving with the face of the wall by dimensioning and locking your sketches. However with curved geometry, this can get tricky. The fast and dumb way to make this all work is to group the geometry and lock it to the wall. An even better way in my opinion, is to create a shared unhosted bracket and then nest it into a wall hosted family. That way you have both a hosted and non-hosted family for the price of one family. This is much more flexible in the long run.

(Note: because of the curves, just locking the parts as mentioned above will be a bit more complex.)

[bill.92885]

Thanks Andre and Aaron but nothing you've suggested has worked. The more I work with Revit the more I want to stick to 2d drafting. It's just so much easier. I've wasted half a day on something that would have taken me 15 minutes in AutoCAD.

[aaronrumple]

Thanks Andre and Aaron but nothing you've suggested has worked. The more I work with Revit the more I want to stick to 2d drafting. It's just so much easier. I've wasted half a day on something that would have taken me 15 minutes in AutoCAD.

Sorry for the frustration. I didn't check the file I posted inside a project. Works in the family, but not in the project.

The template you are using has something in it that was hosed. I haven't tracked down what it was yet. But there are things in a template you just don't mess with. I pasted the information in a new template and it worked fine. The basic outline I set forth should work on any new families you create.

I'll have to see if that was also causing problems with just dimensioning geometry as well.

As for the templates - Don't move built in ref. planes and don't unlock or unpin built in ref. planes. Depending on the template these can both cause issues. I'm guessing that setting the wall in the template to an exterior location line is what screwed things up. But I'll have to test that out.