Profile Families & Reference Lines

When building a complex Profile family, sometimes this can be hampered by the fact that Reference Lines are not available and you are limited to Reference Planes. One thing you can do however, is nest a Detail Item family in a Profile family. Using this fact, you can build a 'rig' of Reference Lines in a Detail Item family. This can then be loaded in and lines can be traced over and locked to this. The Detail Item family is flexed by through-linking its type parameters to identical parameters in the Profile family. The concept is demonstrated in the video below:

I understand that the example can be perfectly achieved directly in a profile family, but I wanted to keep the example simple for the purpose of this post

Starter for 10 - Radius v Diameter

This is my first contribution to the Waterman Revit Blog, which will form the basis of a dialogue of our experience with Revit, particularly in implementation and family creation. This will specifically cover Revit Structure and UK based content, but we hope that all flavours will gain something.

So, introduction over and onto business

Radius v Diameter

If you've ever done anything in a family involving a circular object; pipes, tubular columns etc and wished you didn't have to put in Diameter/2 to drive a radius parameter, then the following video is for you

This outlines a method for creating the parametrics for a tube, using only Diameter and Thickness to drive it, taking your family from this (OOTB example):

To this:

A much neater solution