Revit Family Creation: A Step-by-Step Introduction (Just For Beginners)

PAUL F. AUBIN: All right, as the folks are still milling in-- as the folks are still milling in here, I'm going to start with the introductions, get the boring stuff out of the way, so that we can get going. So welcome to Family Creation, Just for Beginners. If you're not a beginner, you don't belong here. You're welcome but don't blame me if you say he didn't cover anything advanced. It was too basic. It says just for beginners. And it said that for months, so it's not on me. It's on you.

All right, anyway. You can tell that maybe I've gotten a few of these comments in the past. So anyway, I do what I can to try and head those off at the pass. So anyway, welcome, whether you are a beginner or not. My name is Paul Aubin, and I am an author and consultant, architectural consultant specifically. I've authored a big pile of books. Here is the latest ones. You can learn more here. I've also authored a bunch of video training content at Lynda dot-com, slash LinkedIn Learning. So for those of you who don't know, Lynda dot-com is owned by LinkedIn these days, so you can get to the library from both places.

And if you're saying gee, this guy's voice sounds really familiar-- I just can't figure out why, because I've never met him before-- you probably are a Lynda subscriber, and that would be why. Although I had a guy tell me yesterday, yeah, but if you speak a little faster then I would recognize your voice, because I play it at 1 and 1/2 times, which is what I do. So, yeah, I can't stand listening to anything at normal speed. I play all my podcasts fast. I play my training content fast, get more in that way. My wife listens. She says how can you even understand what they're saying? I say you get used to it. So anyway, LinkedIn Learning, slash Lynda dot-com. And of course my regular website for my consulting services, architectural consulting services-- mostly Revit, doing that for a long time.

So a couple administrative items that we want to talk about. Let's meet our lab assistants. Right up here in front we have Matt Stachoni. Thank you, Matt, for being here. We have Matt Dillon in the back. There was a shortage of names that year, so you know. And then we have Desiree Mackey right next to Matt. If you have-- this is a hands-on lab, so if you have any trouble at all, just raise your hand, and one of these folks will come around. These are absolutely the cream of the crop here, so I've been blessed to have the best lab assistants in the entire conference. They are all speakers themselves and teach this same content in their own sessions, so you're in good hands with any of them, if you have any questions.

So if you're not planning to follow along-- there's two per computer-- just hand them out to the other person. This is hands-on, and I hate seeing this. That tells me I failed. So if you're doing that just because you didn't intend to follow along, then give the mouse to somebody else, right? So anyway, either of you can drive, and they'll help you fix an issue.

And then one thing about this virtual environment we're working in, these frame computers, don't do alt-tab, because that will take you out of the frame computer, and then you won't be-- you'll be looking at a weird desktop. So if you are used to doing alt-tab to switch applications, don't. But I don't think you'll need to do that, because we're going to be all in Revit. So not sure why you would need to do that. But if you do, again, raise your hand, and they'll help you.

Does everybody have the handout? Yeah? Good. Didn't see anybody say no. Well, anyway, it's in a couple of places. It's in the app. It's also here. It should actually be on the machine too. So in the data set for the machine are all the files we're going to use today. I think I put a-- if I'm not mistaken-- I put a copy of the PDF in there too. And then it's in the app. If you want it on a separate screen, which I would recommend-- that way you can have full screen for Revit. And also you could get it from my website for later. So there's the PDF and all the data sets that we're going to use today. So you don't have to frantically try and put a thumb drive in and try to figure out how to get stuff off of these frame computers. Don't worry about it. Just go there. You can download it there. It's a zip file to follow along later.

OK, and a couple of basics. I keep forgetting what I have on the next slide, so I had to go peek-- sorry. So this is basics, right? So how many of you have been in the Family Editor before? OK, now, would you say you've only dabbled, or any of those people-- I'm a seasoned family expert? All right, good-- because if you are, again, you're welcome. But you're not going to learn anything new. This is basics. Here's a reference plane. Here's two reference planes. Here's how you constrain them and apply a parameter. This is the kind of stuff we're going be talking about. This is the basics. So if you've ever wondered how those flexible families are created that you work with in your Revit environment, this is how. This is the foundation that you need for that.

OK, so I assume no prior knowledge. How many of you have been to this-- well, first of all, how many newbies, AU newbies? Awesome, I love that. OK, so has anybody been here before, to this lab before? I teach it every year. Really? I'm just messing with you. No-- hey, that's flattering, I guess. You wanted to come again. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, so off we go.

Everything we're going to do today starts with a box. A box you say? Yes, OK, just a plain old box. OK, so why? Because a box is really the foundation for just about everything that we do. Look around the room-- the desk you're sitting at, the monitor in front of you, the chair you're sitting on-- all of these things are made up of a collection of boxes. So if you can make a flexible box that is stable and reliable, then you can put several of these boxes together and create almost any piece of content that you want to create. So that's why we're going to start there.

So I believe-- oh, yeah, and at the end of today-- it's always nice to show you what we're going to have-- this is what we're going to have at the end of today. OK, so we're going to start with a box, and we're going to end up with this, so not bad for-- oh, what time is it right now? Because I forgot to set my timer here. So I should knock five minutes off of that, and then click Go. All right, cool. All right, so that's bad, right? If I don't have my timer jumping at me over here.

OK, so let's get out of there. The handout, I just want to make a couple of comments on. The first eight or nine pages or so here, we are not going to cover in the lab, because nothing irritates me more than sitting in a lab and not being allowed to touch the computer for the first half hour. We're in a lab, so we're going hands-on. But I do encourage you to read all this stuff when you get back to the office, there's a lot here. But I want to stop right here, because the first step of family creation we are going to skip. And that is figure out what you want to do.

So it could be as simple as just a plain, old sketch, right? Kind of rough it out, decide how you want it to behave, what should flex, what shouldn't flex. If you're not sure what I mean by flex, anything that's flexible-- you know adjustable, parametric-- we can make it flex. So that's the Revit geek term for things that move. OK, so decide what you want those things to be, what behaviors you want it to have. And just that way you've got a roadmap. You've got a plan for what you're going to do. So here's like a simulated roadmap of that for our content today, talks about the different shapes that are available, and so on. And then finally down here on like, page nine or 10, everything else is step-by-step.

So there's a couple of things about how we're going to do this today. I've given you files at multiple stages of completion. So if you get behind, raise your hand. If you're too far behind, don't worry about it. I've got catchup files along the way, where you can get caught up without having to do every step, so you're not like, totally lost and doing this. So that's a big blank page. OK, so here's an example of one of those, somewhere. Where is a catchup file? They look like-- there it is. So that outline box there, that's what you're looking for in the handout.

So if you get behind-- and they're always going have letters-- underscore A, B, C, something like that. So if we're working on box, and you get behind, you can go to the letter B one and get caught up. And then you'll be with us, and you can keep going. That's at least what I'm hoping you'll do. And with all of that out of the way, let's go to Revit.

So first thing I like to do is have a project open in my Revit environment. So I've provided this project called Sandbox 101, or 101 sandbox. I can't see the title anymore. Let me see what this is called. There's only one Revit project, so if you go to the data set, which is in-- it's 100 Sandbox. The data set-- it should be in C-Drive, data sets, and then my name. So you go to Revit, you click the Open option, and you're opening a project, not a family. So Open Project. And you're looking for 100 Sandbox. It's the only Revit project. Everything else in that folder are family files. So if you do Open Project, you should only see one thing in there.

I'll give everybody a second. Again, it's under my name-- C-drive, data sets, my name, and then whatever the code for the class is. I forget the title of the-- Yeah, OK, it's only one thing in there. Great. And this is just-- I just added some geometry just so it would be a little bit more interesting. But your sandbox can be anything. You can literally make your own sandbox by just going, Create New Projects, Save As, call it Sandbox, you've got a sandbox.

What is a sandbox? It is just a testing environment. So when you're building flexible families, you want someplace to flex it. So you load it into a project, that's not a real live project, so that you don't break things, right? It's good to have a little testing ground first. You load it in there, and then you test it out there. And then assuming everything works correctly, then you can bring it into a real project. So that's all this is, so it's just this little sandbox project.

So do I have lab assistants thumbs up. Everybody's got it open? All right, fantastic. So let's minimize-- not up here. We're not minimizing Revit. We're minimizing the sandbox. So you're still in Revit. You still have your project browser and everything, but the sandbox just dropped down to the corner there. And now we're going to create a brand new family from scratch.

Now, this is, I think, the best way to learn about the family editors, to build it completely from scratch, on your own, so that everything that's in there you know about because you put it there. Now, eventually you might get to the point where you take other people's families, and you edit those. But then you're going to have to investigate what they did. This way we know that everything in here is ours. OK, so we're going to go to the big-- I'm sorry, I'm still wanting to call this the Big R menu, but the Big R menu is gone. It's the File menu now. So we're going to go to the File menu, highlight New, and then slide over here to Family. Don't click New. If you click New, it's going to create a new project. We don't want to create a new project. We wanna create a new family.

And then you'll get a folder full of templates. Does anybody not have these? Oh good. I think it's been pretty good this year, but last year everybody's template folder was empty-- not cool. Yeah, so-- all right. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about-- so this is hard for me, because I like to explain everything. But if I explain everything, 90 minutes will go by very quickly. So I'm going to ask you guys to trust me. There's a lot in this folder we could talk about, and a lot of it is actually very important. And I'm not going to mention any of it. We're just going to start with a generic model. And I normally would use a different category, but I want the simplest one possible, because, again, we're starting with the basics. We're just doing a box, right?

So generic model-- not any of the ones that say based. See how there's a whole bunch of generic models. You want the one that just says generic model and open it. And just read the handout, the first nine pages. It talks about categories. It talks about the importance of templates. It discusses these things, so you have some background on that.

Now, keyboard shortcut people-- how many of your guys are fond of keyboard shortcuts? About half of you. All right, so WT is Window Tile, so just type the letters WT, and then do ZA, which is Zoom All. So the generic model template actually launches with four windows open. So we have a top view in the upper-left corner. We have two elevation views along the bottom, and we have 3D view over in the upper-right corner. OK, so we're working on a model family in this case. We're going to create this little box. It's going to be a 3D box, so it's a model geometry. So that's why it's nice to have multiple views.

OK, so the first step is to lay down the structure. And that starts with something called reference planes. So if I come over here to the ribbon. If you want the ribbon, it's this button right here, not this one. So we don't want reference lines. We want reference planes. If you're a keyboard shortcut person, RP. And we're going to do this in the top view, the Plan view. And I want you to just sort of click a vertical reference plane, kind of parallel to the center line that's already there. And then there's a little Click Here to Name that shows up in the campus. Go ahead and do that, and we'll name this one Right. And then you just enter it, and that renames that guy.

Now, we're going to do another one running horizontally here, across the top. And we're going to call that one Back. And then we're going to cancel with the Modify tool. Now, you could go ahead and draw left and bottom, but I like to make sure that they're nice and equal, so I usually use mirror here. OK, so I've got one parallel running horizontally, one parallel running vertically. I'm going to take the horizontal one and mirror it around the center line, and the vertical one and mirror it around the center line. And then you don't have to do this, but just so you guys can see my screen a little better, I'm going to drag out my top view, make it a little wider, and zoom in closer, so that you guys can see. But you're welcome to stay with the four screens. OK?

So, again, you can draw these, if you prefer, or do mirror like I did. Now, the two that we just copied with the mirror command don't have names yet. So we're going to name those. So click this one, and it created the name Center LT, which is kind of strange, so we definitely want to rename that. And we'll do left. And then this guy here, we're going to call this one Front.

So what have we got here? Reference planes are similar to grids and levels. Everybody knows about grids and levels in the project environment? Yeah? So these are datum elements. How many of you know about reference planes already? OK, pretty good number of you. All right, so these just provide form and structure. They are datum elements, just like levels and grids. And the general idea, the concept, behind reference planes in the Family Editor is you establish some reference planes to determine where your major components in your family are going to be. You assign dimensions to drive the locations of those reference planes, that's what we're going to do next. And then finally you associate the geometry to those reference planes. So the notion is that one those reference planes move around, it pushes and pulls the geometry with it.

So we've described our box shape in Plan. And the original reference planes that were here are marking the centers of that box. So not only will we have the shape of the box, but we'll also have the centers, which is useful. How many times have you dimensioned or aligned an object and then had a little magic center in there? Right? You ever do that with a wall or-- I mean with a door or a window? Hey, there's a centerline, piece of furniture. Hey, there's a center line, that's kind of cool. That's these reference planes. That's what you're actually dimensioning to. So if you built your box off in the corner and ignored these two reference planes in the corner, you wouldn't have that feature. So if you like the idea of having the center line, do it this way.

All right, so let's add some dimensions. DI is the shortcut, or you can click the Tool. And you want four dimensions total. So we want to go across. Now, for the AutoCAD people, or the people that still don't realize that you can do multiple string dimensions, you see how this is all one piece? Do not do this. Don't do this, and then do another one. That's not the same thing. OK? You can't do what I want to show you if you do that. So what you want is this, one, two, three clicks, and then the fourth click, an empty space. And then this is one, continuous dimension, and you toggle the equality on. You won't get an equal if you do them as two separate dimensions.

Do it again over here, one two, three, toggle the equality. And then you want to go across for an overall here and across for an overall here. So this one is your length, let's say, and this one is you're width. I don't remember what I said-- what I called these in the handout. But I'm just going to kind of wing it here, because it doesn't really matter what we call it. So four dimensions total.

If you want to make that easier to see, you can change the scale right here. OK, the scale and the Family Editor doesn't matter, so choose whatever scale makes things more legible. So I'll make this quarter inch, and that makes those dimensions nice and big. That's optional-- not important if you do that.

All right, select one of your dimensions. I'm going to pick the horizontal one-- not the equal-equal, the one above it. And up here on the ribbon, there's this label area. Now, if you tried to choose something off the list, there's nothing there. There are no labels yet in this file. So right next to that, there's a little icon called Create Parameter. That's what we want to click. Revit is big on hieroglyphics now, so everything is these little icons. We don't have words anymore, because why would we want that, right? We want to pick little pictures. They're emojis. It's the emoji interface.

All right, so when you click that, you should see this screen here. And we're creating our first parameter. Now, you can name your parameters anything you want. I recommend something descriptive, something sort of self-documenting. So how about Length? They'll get to you in just a second. Is it something you can ask me, that I might--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL F. AUBIN: I'm sorry, say it again. I didn't hear you.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL F. AUBIN: Oh, you got to pick the dimension first.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL F. AUBIN: For those of you-- the handout-- we're on page 15 right now. If it's already too late-- is it too late? Somebody already clicked OK? No? Everybody hasn't clicked OK, yet? Good. You already clicked OK? That's all right. It doesn't matter. I'm going to leave mine Length, but you can call it Width. You can call it Bob. It really doesn't matter what you name it. Yeah.

All right, so we're going to make this an instance but not a reporting parameter. Reporting parameters are out of the scope for today. They're a more advanced concept, but they are very useful. But you don't want reporting, so don't check that. Leave it unchecked. But you do want it to be instance.

Everybody what the difference between instance and type is? No? So when you're in Revit, and you go to the Type Selector, and you pick a different object, and everything changes on its own-- and then if you go to Edit Type, you change something, and they all change, that's a type parameter. Instance is when you have to touch each one. So this one is this size. This one is this size. This one's this size. So we're making our box instance parameters, so that each box can be its own size without having to make types.

Which one is correct? Yes, they're both correct. It's a matter of preference, and it's up to you. So you're the designer now. You're working in the Family Editor. You get to decide in your own content, so think it through. So since we're on the topic, I'll tell you how I think about it. So let's use-- how many architects in the room? OK, what are the rest of you? MEP? Any structure? OK, I have an architectural example. I don't really have a good one for the other two.

But all of you have a kitchen, right? You've all been in a kitchen?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

All right, in your kitchen, you have cabinets. If you go to Home Depot to buy cabinets, can you get literally any size cabinet you want? Or are they going to come in standard sizes?

AUDIENCE: Standard sizes.

PAUL F. AUBIN: Standard sizes, that's a type parameter. So the catalog says you can get it 33 inches or 36 inches or 39 inches-- type parameter. What about the countertop? It comes in a length, right? But does anybody use that length? No, somebody cuts it down to fit the situation that they have in the kitchen-- instance parameter. So if you think of it that way, I think it'll help you. So whatever you're designing, if it comes from the factory, in standard sizes that the person buying the unit can't change without spending a lot of money and building it custom, then it's a type parameter. And if it's something that you intend the end user to manipulate-- some assembly required, right-- that's an instance parameter. If you use that as a rule of thumb, I think you'll be OK, when you're designing families on your own. Now, obviously there will be other criterias that will factor in. And there's always nuance, but that will get you started.

Now, Edit Tool Tip I'm going to show you here, but I'm probably going to be lazy about for the rest of the day. But in my own content I'm actually pretty religious about this. Tool Tips give the end user more information. So here-- length is pretty self-explanatory. But if I say hey, this is the length of the box, and-- again, if I couldn't figure that out-- but I'm going to show you what that looks like in just a second.

So let's click OK here, and the word Length or Width or Bob or whatever you put there should show in front of the dimension now. That's how you know you've successfully labeled it. And there should be a checkbox right up here, under instance parameter. If it's not checked, you don't have to undo and start over again, just check the box. And that'll make that an instance parameter.

So let's repeat for right here-- new parameter-- I called that one Length, so this one I'm going to call Depth. In the handout, I don't remember what I called it, so whatever you want. Call this one Ralph. It's also instance. I'm going to skip the Tool Tip this time just to save time and click OK. So you should have two named and labeled parameters on those two dimensions. It is now time to flex.

All right, flex is how we test our family, make sure it's working. There's a weird mystery button over here called Family Types, which doesn't at all seem like the place you would go to flex. You thinking why doesn't just call it flex, right? Well, more on that in a minute. But anyway, Depth and Length-- all you have to do is put in a different value here. So Family Types button, which I covered-- sorry, move this out of the way. Family Types button, which I covered-- move it out of the way. So click that button, you're in here. Depth and Length-- I'm going to make this one 3 by, maybe, 5, and then click Apply.

And if everything moves and adjusts the way you expect, then give yourselves a hand. You just made your first parametric family. Congratulations. Yeah. See, it's easy. You're all experts now. Now, honestly, if your main goal is to manipulate geometry, it's just lather, rinse, repeat now. Literally, that's family creation process, is you're thinking of how you want it to structure, you build the parameters and constraints that are required to make that happen, and then oh, well, we might want some geometry, so let's do that next.

OK, so click OK here to close that window. And geometry comes in five shapes in the Family Editor. These are all detailed in the handout-- extrusions, blends, revolves, sweeps, swept blends. We're going to do a simple extrusion, which is just draw a shape and give it a height. So our shape is a simple rectangle. So click Extrusion. That puts you into sketch mode. This is like-- has anybody ever drawn a floor before in a project? Who's never drawn a floor? Really? Never drawn a floor? Wow. Have you ever drawn a sketch-based object? Nothing. OK, so you're starting with the Family Editor. Congratulations. Well, it's all right. That's good.

All right for the rest of you, it's just like drawing a floor. So let's choose rectangle for the option here. I'm confident he's going to do great. He's probably going to pass all you guys up. So we're going to click Rectangle here, and then we're going to snap from opposite corners of those reference planes that we just drew. And then I want you to close all these little locks-- one, two, three, four. If you miss one, don't get frustrated-- Escape, Undo, start over, all that stuff. Just use your Align command, Reference Plane, Sketch Line, Lock-- Reference Plane, Sketch Line, Lock. Just takes longer, right? So if you miss one, no big deal. Just use your Align and Lock.

All right, once you've done that, we click this big green check box right here. And what I'm going to do is just stretch this back again, so you can see it in all four views. But I'm going to click at that little check box right there. And now I have a box visible in all the views. You are welcome to adjust these and change the shading if you want to. It's entirely up to you. But there is your wonderful box. All right. So far, so good.

We have one more thing to do. We want to make a flexible height. So right now our height is just arbitrarily determined by the box. It's using a default-- happens to be 1 foot tall. How many metric people in the room? OK, here's my one blanket apology-- sorry. America. That's all I have to say.

I'm going to go into the front view. You can also do this in the left view, doesn't matter. Any elevation will work. I'm going to stretch mine out bigger just so you guys can see. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And again, this is the lather, rinse, repeat part, so here's the repeat. We want a reference plane. So Create Panel Reference Plane or type RP. You want to draw it parallel to the floor, and then let's go ahead and name that Top. And then cancel out of there.

And now this next thing is very important. Everybody look up here before you do. When you dimension, please do not choose the box. Everybody always wants to highlight the box. If it says Extrusion Shape Handle, do not click. Move your mouse away from there, so that it says Reference Level. You always want it a dimension reference-to-reference if you can. So reference level to top and place your dimension. I would explain why, but I already saw Daisy look at her watch, which means I'm already behind time. So I'm not going to explain why. I'm going to ask you to trust me. Don't dimension directly to the box. You'll have much more chance of errors that way.

Cancel out of there, select the dimension, and label it with a new parameter. So click the little icon, call this one Height. I'm going to also make it instance and click OK. Now, that's the structure of the framework. Now we need to make the box match it, right? So if you just click the box, there's a little grip handle on the top. Or you can use the Align command. It's up to you. Just take your box, drag this little grip until it snaps to your new reference plane. When you let go, a lock will appear. Go ahead and lock it. And now we've got a parametric height as well as a width and a depth.

So-- yeah, just click the box and drag the little grip. All right, go ahead and flex that height. So does everybody remember how to flex? Go back to Family Types, which is right here, and then just put in a different value for that height, and the height should change.

Everyone do Save As and call it Box, or whatever you want. I don't care what you call it. But do save it. You can put it right in the data set folder, which is going to cause me problems this afternoon, but whatever. I forgot, I'm repeating this lab, so the afternoon people will see your stuff, but-- If you don't save it, you can go on to the next step. It'll just-- in the project, it'll call itself Family One. Family One is kind of a dumb name, right? So that's why I like to save it. So if you want to have control over naming, it's a good idea to get in the habit of saving first.

Now up here on the ribbon, there are two load buttons. So there's Load into Project, and there's Load into Project and Close. If you're done with the family, and you don't need to do anything else, you can do Load into Project and Close. It puts it away and loads it, all in one step. We're not done with the family, so we're just going to use Load into Project and keep it open. So don't do the and-close. Do the first one, Load into Project. That will take your sandbox that you previously minimized, pop it forward, and allow you to place your box.

So click Load into Project, and you should be right back here in the sandbox. And now you can click anywhere to place your box. And what I'd like you to do is place maybe two or three of them. And the reason we want to do two or three is-- anybody have a guess why?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PAUL F. AUBIN: Because they're instance parameters. So now you should be able to click on one of those boxes, change the size, and it won't affect the other two. Go ahead. Go do it. How do you do it? Either on the Properties palette, or it actually should have some little grips on it. So-- they don't do their own 3D. Did anybody go to John Pearson's class yesterday, that I TA-ing for? No? All right, well, he talked about how to make the grips appear in 3D. So if you want to look up John Pearson and download his paper from yesterday's lab, you can learn how to make the grip handles show in 3D. If you switch to a floor plan view though, you should see grip handles. But let's just do it in 3D, and there they are right there in the properties.

So just click your box and flex it right there. OK, so this one, I'm going to make it 4 by 5, by-- I hate when it does that. Why is it-- it's not letting me edit for some reason. Is anybody else having that problem?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PAUL F. AUBIN: It's not doing it though. That was weird. So I switched selection, and it worked. I don't know why. I think I'm going to tell the Revit people I found a bug, because totally feels like a bug to me. All right, so anyway, did you see how I'm able to flex that one to different sizes?

Now, hover your mouse over each of these parameters. Don't click it. Just put your mouse there. Do you see how Depth just says the name, Height just says the name. But if I go down to Length, it says this is the length of the box. So do you remember when we put the Tool Tip into the parameter? If you want that experience for yourself and for your users, then put the Tool Tips in. That's where they come into play.

Hey Matt. All right, any questions on the basic box? This is our foundation that we're going to use for everything else we build today. But any questions here? Nothing? Awesome, I did my job. [SIGHS] Yeah, question?

AUDIENCE: So at that point you have an extrusion model [INAUDIBLE] take the shape out [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL F. AUBIN: Yeah, but that would happen back in the Family Editor. Yeah, so he asked if we could take a shape out, or we could change the shape of the box? Does it have to just stay a box? Absolutely. You'd use a void, or you might build the extrusion a different shape. All that you could do. We'll have a simple example, but again, we have 51 minutes left, so we'll see.

All right, so keep this open. Just minimize it, like we did before. That should bring you right back to your box. Did you need a-- as soon as they're done-- you want to ask me real quick?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL F. AUBIN: OK, you're all set? OK. All right, so let's move on. For those of you looking at the handout, we are moving on to page 18 here. And what we're going to do now is turn our box into a shelf. Now, if you want to at this point, at the top of page 18 there is a catchup file. So anybody who is a little less confident about the state of their box is more than welcome to open this catchup file, and then you'll be looking at exactly what I'm going to be looking at. And I'm going to do that, because I wasn't on script, remember? So I even use different names for the parameters and so forth.

So to close this, please, please I'm begging you, don't x-out four times. That's a terrible habit to get into. Hold your Control key down and press W. There it goes, one step. So Control W is the same as going to the File menu and choosing Close. That closes the whole project, regardless of what windows you have open. And the nice thing is if you reopen that later, it remembers the four views you had open. If you x them all out, it doesn't do that. So you worked harder, and you didn't benefit from keeping those views open the next time.

All right, so I'm going to go to Open. Those of you that want to follow with me are welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can stay in your own box. OK, so if you're happy with your box, you don't need to close and do this. But I'm going to open 102, Shelf A, which is at the top of page 18. And let's see if this-- see how I'm able to view WT and ZA again. That's because when I close this, I did Control W. I didn't x-out the four boxes, so that's why you get all four windows. So it looks exactly the same as where we just left off. That's why I told you, you could stay with yours if you want to. But I'm just making sure that I didn't miss a step somewhere by opening up my catch-up file.

OK, so this one is going to become our shelf. So if you remember the PowerPoint, our end goal is to do a retail shelving unit. So we still got a lot of work to do. We've got a box right now, how do we turn a box into a shelf? Well, if you think about it, the shelf itself is really just a long, thin box, right? So really all you should need to do is flex here. But there's one small thing we want to change. Think about the way that we built our box. Could anybody figure out what the thing we want to change is, if we want to turn a box into a shelf? Anyone?

AUDIENCE: Height.

PAUL F. AUBIN: The height. What do we want to do to it?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PAUL F. AUBIN: Besides the thickness-- we definitely want to make it shorter, but are we OK with the way it's defined?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PAUL F. AUBIN: Under the--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL F. AUBIN: Well, no, again, we're going to change the heights. So what I'm getting at is look at the way we built it. It's going up from the level. Now, when you think about things like countertops and shelving and whatever else, do you think about measuring the height from the underside here, or do you think about it from here? The top, right? So wouldn't it be better if we reversed and made it extrude down, instead of extrude up. These are the kinds of things you have to think about now that you are all going to be family authors. So you have to think about all those little details. And if you don't, the experience that your end users will have will not be so pleasant.

So draw a-- I'm going to work in elevation. Draw a new reference plane down here. Now, if you want, you can just take the one that's already here and copy it. So I'm just going to take that guy at the top and copy it down somewhere. Now, do you see how when you copy it, it does a strange name again, Center LS. That's kind of a dumb name, so I'm going to change that to underside. Now, you can also do RP and just draw it. So there's nothing special about copying it versus drawing it. It's entirely up to you. But you do want to get in the habit of naming them descriptively, because otherwise you're going to get all those goofy names that Revit gives them, which aren't very useful.

Now, I want you to dimension it. Again, do I want to dimension from here? No. I want to dimension here from the level, down to the reference plane, and then escape out of there. Now take this dimension and label it with the same height parameter, and that will immediately flex it. And we're going to end up with three feet below, or whatever you left your height at, below the reference level. But naturally we can flex that height.

Now, in some cases it's possible to flex right on screen. Because I don't have any geometry associated with this reference plane yet, it's a pretty safe thing to do. But if you've got a really complex family, I usually use the Family Types dialogue. I find it safer. But in this case I'm gonna shortcut by just clicking right in the word height, and that activates that dimension. And what's a good thickness? Well, maybe like 3/4 of an inch. Sorry, metric people. If you want to type 18 or 19 and type MM after it, it will do the math for you. So you can actually work in millimeters, even though it's an imperial file, if you feel like-- you just have to remember to type MM.

All right, so when I do that, notice that that flex both instances of the height parameter, because it's still applied to the height of the box. But the box is still going that way, instead of this way. So I'm going to zoom in nice and close on this thing. And I think I'm doing this slightly differently than I did in the paper, but that's all right. If I am, you'll see it a different way when you go back to paper. Select this box. We're going to talk about the concept of work plane now.

Everything that you draw in Revit is associated to a work plane, but you may not know that, because most of the time Revit guesses the work plane for you, and it does a good job at doing that. So when you draw walls, for example, in the project environment, it's pretty obvious what the work plane is. It's whatever level you're working on. But in the family environment, because we're working in multiple views, it's not always obvious what the work plane is. And sometimes it guesses wrong.

You can always change the work plane. So our box was built on the work plane reference level, but we actually want the work plane to be that new reference plane that we just created, the underside reference plane. So select your box. And up on the ribbon there is an Edit Work Plane button, right here. Click that. That will display a dialog. And this is one of the reasons why naming your reference planes is so important, because if you click this dropdown, notice that your underside reference plane is right there on the list. So I can choose it.

And you may be surprised at the result. Notice that the bottom edge of the box actually stretched down. Now, does that make sense to everybody, why I did that-- if you think about the way we built family? Right, we locked the top edge to that top reference plane.

Now, go ahead and try and pull that grip down to the level, and you're going to get an error. And again, if you've ever worked with constraints before, that shouldn't surprise you, because it's telling you I can't do that unless you remove the constraint. It's telling you what we just agreed was the problem. We just said we've got it locked to the top reference plane. And Revit is saying yup, I sure do. Constraints aren't satisfied. Just click OK-- or sorry, Remove Constraints. Just click Remove Constraints. And it will allow you to remove that constraint, and then you can lock it now to the new location, to apply the new constraint.