Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Revit MEP Family Wisdom - Connector Placement

This is snipped from the Family Editor (Imperial) Tutorial provided with the Revit MEP 2008 release. I don't believe there is a more recent version of it unless they have incorporated some or all of it into the current help documentation online. Some of it certainly was part of the previous WikiHelp site but I haven't checked to see if everything is now part of the new online help yet.

You can download PDF copy of the tutorial HERE.

When you place fitting connectors, the primary connector must be placed on the face that is on the X-axis. You can verify this by viewing the face in a floor plan view. Unexpected behavior can result if the primary connector is not properly placed relative to the other connectors, and that if all connectors are not properly rotated and linked.

The primary connector is the one that has the crosshair or "X" in the connector graphics. You can also Reassign Primary on the ribbon when the connector is selected.


This pearl of wisdom also appears at the beginning of the Creating an Elbow Family topic:

Fittings are among the most complex families to create. It is recommended that you methodically follow the steps and periodically check your work against the exercise. It may take a longer to complete this exercise as compared to other exercises in this tutorial. Even if you have created parametric families before, creating system families typically takes more time to complete.

1 comment:

Dave Baldacchino said...

Thanks for this Steve! I've never had the joy of creating one of these families from scratch, but when I edited some, I always wondered why on earth you could rotate the connector in the family editor and what it actually achieved.