Thursday, September 22, 2016

2016-17 Door Library - Head Height

A comment was submitted to an earlier post about the new library of door families that came with the 2016 release. The question had to do with changing the head height of these doors. There are two folders (see the images in the other post): Residential and Commercial as well as a smaller collection of doors that are more similar to the past door library we had, but using a new naming convention.

The doors in the Commercial folder have an Instance parameter called Masonry Frame which toggles on/off a solid form that adjusts how thick or high the head of the door is. This image is the same door side by side but with the parameter off on the left and on for the door on the right.


The doors in the Residential folder don't share this family strategy. Neither do the individual door families that are found in the root Doors folder. What is visible on the residential doors is trim, not a frame. The trim is designed to turn off if the Door Offset parameter is not set to zero. The frame form they do have are based on a sweep that doesn't allow for varying its dimensions.

Like all families, how they were conceived of and then created greatly affects their usefulness. In the case of the comment posted, the commercial collection of doors may work for them where the residential ones probably won't; not without some fundamental changes to the families themselves first.

2 comments:

rgesner said...

Hi Steve,
One flaw in the Commercial door families:
When placed in a project, dimensions snap to reference planes that you would never want them to. I tracked the culprits down to reference planes buried in their frame profiles. We had to edit both frame profiles in each family and set several of these reference planes to Not a Reference.
- Rusty

Steve said...

Thanks for letting me know.