Custom Revit Family Templates

[mfoley]

We are establishing Revit standards for our office and we are trying to set up some family templates that already have our lineweights, linestyles, etc. loaded into them.
I haven't been able to save to a family template file in .rft format. Is this not possible? Am I overlooking something? Is there a work around?

Thanks.

[mfoley]

Answered my own question...

http://www.becausewecan.org/Making_y...mily_Templates

[phyllisr]

...we are trying to set up some family templates...

We took a similar path five years ago when we originally migrated to Revit and we still maintain "custom" templates. Remember when you set Line Weights and Line Styles, the project always takes priority. No matter how careful you might be in your family template and how perfect your content might be, if one of your team members tinkers with the setting in the project, your hard work at the family level will have no effect.

A word of caution... I originally thought I was being really clever creating a template for typical wood frame doors and windows and one for HM doors and windows and more. I quickly learned that once you have something in a template, you have locked it in the family forever. Making quick changes on the fly or duplicating the family to make a similar one that might require deleting something you had in your template is impossible. Like a reference plane that is no longer necessary or an extrusion you no longer need... Once in the template, always in the family... Unless you have a really good friend at Autodesk who will fix it for you...

Ultimately, we went back to a single template for each family type with anything we wanted consistent (including Object Styles) created in advance. We loaded all the shared parameters that might apply to any family but added no reference planes or geometry.

My other big mistake was a limited understanding of how Object Styles in family templates function. Originally, I did not have my arms around how Object Styles worked and we created a few family templates with way more object styles than necessary. Unfortunately, even if you remove the object style from the family at a later date, Revit knows it was in the template. So when the family is loaded into a project, the original template Object Styles come along for the ride. We still have projects that occasionally show evidence of my original silly decisions with extra unnecessary object styles. Sort of embarrassing...

[phyllisr]

Oh, and keep a copy of the original OOTB templates. I promise you will not regret this.

[alberto1987445389]

Answered my own question...

Hi,

I am working with Revit 2013, and while doing the steps given by that link you posted, windows gave me an error when I tried to open the file after changing its file extension, from RFT to RFA. The error says: ""File Componente de Detalle.rfa is not a valid .rfa file. Try changing file's extension to .rft and opening it again."

I don't know if I am doing something wrong (though the steps are pretty simple and clear, I just copied the family template, changed its name and its file extension, and both actions were allowed by Windows) or that the post we used, from 2008, is not applicable with new Revit versions, such as 2013.

Does anyone know a solution to my problem, or a different path to make your own custom family template?


Thanks