Welcome to the final part of this 17 part series on creating your own custom model components using the Family Editor. If you have just stumbled across this article without reading the previous parts of the series, you may want to start here

We’ve covered a lot of concepts over the course of the series, but by now hopefully you’ve gained enough knowledge to be able to create your own components. If there’s any particular aspect that you would like to discuss further or indeed feel wasn’t covered adequately in the articles, please feel free to let us know in the Forums. I like nothing better than to talk Revit, so keep the posts coming! 

Anyway, back to the matter in hand! You’ve created your component. You’ve tested it to see that all the parameters and Types behave themselves and function as you’re expecting. So all that’s left to do is to get on and use the component in your model!

First of all you should make sure that you’ve saved your component somewhere safe. Revit Families that you create can be saved as separate files in their own right. The have the .RFA file extension (Revit FAmily). If you create a new family in the Family Editor it will be called “Family1” by default until you save it with a name of your choosing.

So quite simply, before you use your component go to File>Save As.. and give your component a name and a safe place to reside. You may want to save it in with the stock Revit families or you may wish to start your own library.

Now you have given it a name you can go ahead and load it into your project. To load it straight into a project from the Family Editor, select “Load into Projects” from the bottom of the Family Editor Design Bar…

This will load a copy of the Family file into the current project. If you have previously created a component and wish to load it from wherever you saved it, just select “Component” from the “Basics” Design Bar (from within your Project)…

You can now select “Load” from the Options Bar…..

And now it’s just a case of navigating to the location where you saved your component, and select it.

That concludes our series on creating your own custom components. I sincerely hope you enjoyed the series and that you found it useful. If you have any feedback on any of the material that you’ve read here at Revit Zone, please feel free to share it with our community in the Forums.