Saturday, April 23, 2016

Family Templates and Reference Plane Inequity

This is subtle but still a source of amusement or annoyance. Start a new family using the Generic Model template and try to copy an existing Reference Plane. Nope, the Copy tool is disabled.


Now try it with the Furniture template. Ah, Copy is enabled.


Try it in the Casework family template. You'll find Right, Left and Front Reference Planes are forbidden while the Center (Left/Right) and Back Reference Planes are not. That makes sense. Wait, what?

Okay, the rule is copying a Reference Plane working on furniture is okay and doing that in Generic Model templates = BAD? Doing it in the Casework template is, well it depends...

Actually the only rule is that you can expect some reference planes in some templates to be forbidden to copy while others are not affected by such thinking. Ralph Waldo Emerson cautioned us to avoid a foolish consistency. In this case a little more consistency wouldn't be bad.

...I'm not asking for all of them to be forbidden either...if you're wondering.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I need to open DXML file format with Revit programm, DXML model file is exported from CATIA, or how can i do it ?

Does Catia file are supported by revit program. How ?

Steve said...

Revit natively supports .IFC .DXF .DWG .STL .SKP I'd see if you can export to one of those directly. I read that Catia supports DXF. You can also check out this company's suite of import tools for Revit.

http://revitaddons.blogspot.com/2016/04/roundup-3d-import-and-export-macros.html?m=1

Rob Valenti said...

Great, subtle observation, as usual, Steve.
Apart from noodling it out, is there a simple way to tell from which template an already existing family was started? I wanted to emulate an out-of-the-box one: toilet-domestic-2D.rfa - and found that I could not trace it back to an obvious source. Thanks!

BTW, I notice that the replies to your blog posts have no dates, just times, or days. Is that intentional, or is there some setting on my end that I could change?