Nested Family Naming Convention

I am finding that many families really should be based on nested families, i.e. wall mounted toilets, urinals and toilet room accessories where you want a height as part of the type. Or light fixtures that can be wall or ceiling mounted. Doors and relites also.
My inclination is then to have some naming convention so that you know what is a nesting family and what is a hosting family (bad nomenclature there I know, because "hosting" already means something else in Revit.)
Anyway, just wondering if anyone else has come up with a naming convention and found it to be easier to manage libraries? Or do folks just have a folder for the nestED kept separate from the NestING, which are the ones that people actually place?

Any insights are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Gordon

Unless you plan to use the nested families by themselves, you don't really have to save them at all, since they are saved within the parent family. If you plan to use the nested family in more than one parent family, you could just save them until you get them all loaded into parent families, and then delete them to help keep your library from getting too cluttered.

Once the family is loaded into another family, you can edit the nested family by just clicking on Edit Family after you select, or from the project browser in the Family Editor. Then just reload into the family without saving, or save it if you need to put it into another parent family.

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Originally Posted by patricks

Unless you plan to use the nested families by themselves, you don't really have to save them at all, since they are saved within the parent family. If you plan to use the nested family in more than one parent family, you could just save them until you get them all loaded into parent families, and then delete them to help keep your library from getting too cluttered.

Once the family is loaded into another family, you can edit the nested family by just clicking on Edit Family after you select, or from the project browser in the Family Editor. Then just reload into the family without saving, or save it if you need to put it into another parent family.

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I do expect to use the nestED family multiple times. I guess some will be things that don't change, but others may change often. My convention elsewhere has been to put an underscore in front of things that are Revit idiosyncracies so to speak, rather than just being architectural objects. A nested family would qualify in this case.

The other piece is just to verify that no nestED families are being used directly. Naming and schedules would make that easy.

Thanks!
Gordon

Quote:

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Originally Posted by patricks

Unless you plan to use the nested families by themselves, you don't really have to save them at all, since they are saved within the parent family. If you plan to use the nested family in more than one parent family, you could just save them until you get them all loaded into parent families, and then delete them to help keep your library from getting too cluttered.

Once the family is loaded into another family, you can edit the nested family by just clicking on Edit Family after you select, or from the project browser in the Family Editor. Then just reload into the family without saving, or save it if you need to put it into another parent family.

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What about the use of shared families? Doesn't that help you when you have the same shared family nested (SNF) in multiple parent families in your project or template? This allows you to update the SNF directly without opening the parent family first. Also, you don't have to go through all of your families that have this SNF loaded into them one at a time, hoping you didn't forget one. Patrick, please let me know if I missed something.

Thanks,
Jeff S.

We name ALL families, nested, shared, or otherwise, using a rigid system that outlines certain things about the families.

Basically, the ONLY exception to the naming convention is parametric radial arrays. The only reason thats different, is because it takes 5 levels deep of a nested family to achieve the flexibility we wanted, so in that case its the standard naming convention plus "Level1-level4" appended to the end.

The naming convetion delineates what catagory the item is, what manufacturer and model (or if its generic), if its a fixed size, a parametric item, or a specific model number, and if its loose, hosted, face based, line based, etc. So the loose unhosted one is called "loose" and if its nested in to a wall hosted version, that one is called the same thing but it diesnt say -loose at the end, it says -wh.

BTW- nine times out of ten we make them all shared, so it does matter.