The Family Man's Family Template

I created my own set of family templates to reduce the steps I always seem to take when making Revit families often on the fly. The process is straight forward and quite helpful.

First start a new family with one of the out of the box templates. I like Generic Model.rft. Now, make tweaks that apply to most every family of this type you like. I typically do the following.

• Create additional reference planes.

• I always need them.
• I name them here to ensure consistent naming convention.
• I apply the correct "Is Reference" parameter.
• Reference planes have positive and negative sides. I have OCD, by modeling them in the company template I ensure they are all drawn left to right and bottom to top providing consistent results.

• Constrain Reference Planes.

• Again, I always do this. Most every family I make has three basic dimensions. For families placed on ceilings I use Width, Length, and Depth.  For families placed on floors and walls I use Width, Length, and Height.
• Pre-constraining builds in consistency you will get no other way.

• Add Solids
• At this point you might as well add a default solid and lock it to the planes you created.
• You can also apply default materials if needed.

After completing all the tweaks desired, save the new family as a *.RFA, then in Windows explorer, change the file type to *.RFT. You will get a warning from Windows, just go by it. You now have a Revit family template of your own. Encourage the use your templates by defaulting users to a folder with your standards templates in Options.