Building Stronger Families Class - Family Examples

[Steve_Stafford]

This family was part of the Building Stronger Families class at AU this year but due to the lack of time to dig in very deep I never demonstrated an alternative method it uses to provide mullions.

This family is intended to be used as a nested part of a window family. It is also a "proof of concept" and not necessarily ready for your use, so buyer beware. It does offer a pretty simple approach to provide mullion options without meddling with arrays. The trick in this case is that the mullion void depth is adjusted using yes/no parameters.

One nice result of using nested families (for some situations) is that you can hide complexity from the user at the project level by only exposing those variables in the final family that you want the user to be able to change.

Keep in mind, with the new ability to nest families and then swap them out in the family it might be as efficient to just nest mullion families and then swap out entire units. Particularly if you want mullion profiles to be something other than square. But I'd caution against this level of modeling detail as you may very well pay for it later.

Interesting side effect: This family started life as a generic model and then was switched to the window category. It can be placed without a host in a project as is, but is still a window. This means you can drop it in a project and mess around with it. You don't have to create a window family to nest it in first.

(Sorry...7.0 Family)

[David Conant]

Watch out Pixar. Here is the Luxo Lamp family from the Building Stronger Families class at AU. It demonstrates the use of Reference Lines to construct linked rotatable parts. It is a spot lighting fixture. The spot tracks the position and angle of the lamp head. It was made quickly, so there is some approximation in the behavior of the parts. With some more work, you could make it behave exactly like a real Luxo. (arms should be variable parallelograms not fixed, joint plates should rotate based on the arm angles, there should be a head attachment element)

[Joef]

Thank You! I was hoping to get a look at the Luxo Lamp.! Reference Lines are something I plan to investigate.

Joe Feldman

[bclarch]

Watch out Pixar.

Yeah, but can you make it hop?

It demonstrates the use of Reference Lines to construct linked rotatable parts.

Sounds useful for MEP applications

Thanks for posting the fixture.

[Wes Macaulay]

Ah, that's grand. Was double-booked so couldn't make that class - was this family the main aspect of the class, or is there more? Sounds like some catch-up for the local Revit bigot.

[Scott D Davis]

there were several families demostrated....hopefully we get those uploaded here too, so we can check them out!

[David Conant]

Here is a group of families that make up a set of casework with parametrically interchangeable doors. By embedding a shared Family Type parameter in the host piece of casework, the identity of the nested door used in each instance can be shown in a schedule. Place instances of either Base Cabinet-Single, or Base Cabinet-Corner in a project. Select instances and open the properties. Select the instance parameter Door Style and set it to the style you want. In the project, create a Casework schedule and include the parameter Door Style in the list of parameters.

[Scott Hopkins]

Steve,

I like your approach to handling the muntin divisions in your sash family. Simply pulling different void combinations in and out of the sash area appears to be a very efficient way of creating muntins. I think it may be the way be the preferred way to create different muntin configurations from now on. While the array approach may ultimately give you a little more flexibility, it can take forever to load some of those complex window/muntin families into a model. You can sometimes wait 60 seconds or more while your CPU crunches all the numbers needed to calculate the arrays. Your void approach is so much faster. Good work!

[nrenfro]

I agree the drag arrays put on the CPU is a bummer. I know when ever anyone loads my window family which contains a modified version of Scott's Muntin family (thank you again) I hear groans. However the flexibility available in that family has made it a favorite. this approach with the voids however has me very interested and I will have to play around with it. It's so simple, and with nested families it can probably be made to match 85% of the flexibility we are getting from arrayed muntins.