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Welcome to the eighth part in our series on Custom Components. If you missed the previous articles, you may wish to start here.

In the previous part to this series we looked started to look at Family Templates. In this article we will continue to look at the range of templates available to you when creating your own custom families.

I’ve made this point before, but I definitely think it is worth repeating again here. When you start creating a new family from scratch, you never start with a completely blank canvas. You must always choose a family template upon which to start creating your component, be it 3D geometry, 2D detail component or 2D symbol.

Let’s go back just a little a this point and talk about Categories and Sub-Categories. Revit uses Categories and Sub-Categories to organise the elements within your model. They are the closest thing that Revit has to AutoCAD Layers.

Categories are the top-level hierarchical structure and are pre-defined by Revit. You cannot either add to or delete any of these Categories. To see the range of available Categories, just right click over any View and select View Properties

Then select Visibility/Graphics Overrides….

You will now be presented with a list of Categories for both Model Elements and Annotations…

When you create a new element in your model (for example a section of wall), Revit assigns a Category to it. Wall elements would obviously be filed away under the Wall category.

So how does all this relate to Family Templates? Well, when you create your own components, it’s often very useful to have these associated with a Category (or Sub-Category) so that you can control both it’s overall visibility and also how it is drawn and printed. For example, if you create your own piece of bespoke furniture, it is useful to have it placed in the Furniture Category so that your turn the visibility of all furniture items on or off. You may want a finer degree of control over your objects by creating and utilising Sub-Categories. For example, instead of just lumping all furniture components under “Furniture”, you may wish for Sub-Categories of Furniture such as Tables / Chairs / Desks / Worktops / etc. Unlike Categories, you CAN create and delete your own Sub-Categories- but that’s for another article!

The default Family Templates that ship with Revit give a clue to both which Category they’re intended for and also whether they are for the creation of Hosted or Non-Hosted Families. For example….

This template would be used for an object that you wish to be associated with the top-level Category “Plumbing Fixtures” and also to be Wall-based (ie it will require a Wall for a Host).

Templates that for hosted families will always contain a small section of the Host within them. For example a blank Wall-based Family looks like this….

Likewise a new Window Family Template will look like this…

If you feel your component does not readily fit into any of the pre-set Revit Categories, you can always use the “Generic Model” templates….

As you can see from the above image, there is a Generic Model template for each Host-type as well as a non-hosted template.

Different Family Templates also include a number of other bespoke attributes related to what you are trying to create. For example, Door templates come pre-loaded with a range of line types suitable for representing door swings in plan and elevation….

From this article you will be aware of the range of pre-defined templates that are available to assist you in the creation of your own custom components. While you are becoming comfortable with the whole process of Family / Component creation, it is probably wise to stick with the “Generic Model Templates”.

In the next part of this series we will take a look at the Family Editor itself.