Creating reference planes

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Reference planes are very important when creating rev

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families,

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the planes control the geometry and facilitate placement

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and positioning of the family within a R

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project.

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Reference planes form the parametric framework or skeleton of a family.

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As its name suggests,

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reference planes are planar elements and can be seen in multiple views.

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In the view below.

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You can see that we have the red reference planes shown in plain and

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those same reference planes are also shown in the front and back elevation.

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We're going to begin by placing out a structural foundation.

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So let's go ahead and select the structure ribbon

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and on the structure ribbon, we'll select isolated foundation.

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You'll note here that if I move over the edge of the floor slab,

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I can align my foundation.

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If I move over this reference plane again,

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the foundation will lock or snap onto that alignment.

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That's due to the reference planes configured within this family.

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If I just place down the foundation in a random location,

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perhaps like this and I now want to align or

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dimension that to one of these references in the project,

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I can go to the align command

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and notice when I hover over particular reference planes here rev

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it shows a tool tip explaining the reference plane name.

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So in this case, you can see this is center left, right.

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If I move over this plane here, you can see this is center front back.

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OK. I'm going to release the align command by clicking modifier.

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And I just want to show you what happens if I drag this over a reference.

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So if I select this structural foundation and just drag it,

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you can see that again that would align to

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these various different planes and edges of geometry.

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But notice I can't align the actual face of the foundations.

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So let's now take a look at this foundation in a bit more detail.

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Make sure that the structural foundation is selected

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and notice up on the context ribbon,

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we can select edit family,

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the edit family option is also available on the context menu.

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So let's go ahead and open this up in the family editor.

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I'd like to start by taking a look at the floor plan reference level

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in the project browser. Let's go ahead and double click ref

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level.

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And you can see here that we have a number

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of reference plans already set up within this particular project.

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So note here we have the default reference planes,

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I have reference plane center left, right,

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this plane will be pinned by default

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and notice here that this also defines the origin.

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If I select both of these planes,

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you'll notice that the intersection of those

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two reference planes defines the origin,

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which is, in fact the insertion point.

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If I select this reference plane out on the edge here,

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you'll notice that the is reference instance property is set to not a reference,

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that means that I can't dimension or align to this.

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Now, of course,

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we just saw this in the project environment and the fact that

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when I dragged my foundation over the edge of other geometry,

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it wouldn't actually align or snap

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if I wanted this to actually snap on align,

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I'm gonna hold my control key down and select the boundary reference planes.

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And for this reference instance parameter,

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I'm going to set this to strong reference.

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The strong reference is the primary thing that rev

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will try to align to or dimension to.

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I also have another option here of using a weak reference that would perhaps need

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the use of the tab key or to zoom in to get that reference.

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But in this case, I want these to be strong references.

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Again,

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another valuable thing to note is that these

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reference planes would appear in multiple views.

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If I select the center left, right reference plane here

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and I open up the front view,

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you'll notice that the same reference plane is now displayed in the front view.

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And of course, it would also be displayed in the back view as well.

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So the reference planes are not just dotted lines.

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They are plain elements that we can actually utilize to build up our families.

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So let's now take a look at this back in the project environment.

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Notice up on the context ribbon,

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I have two options to load this family back into my project.

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And the one I want to utilize here is load into project and close.

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I'm not going to save changes to this

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and here I want to overwrite the existing version.

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So now if I select my foundation

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and I simply drag this

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notice now that I can actually align it to those reference planes on the edge.

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That's because I changed a reference plane from not a reference to in this case,

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a strong reference.