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.

Doors and a Sliver of a Room

Following on my post yesterday regarding Doors and Rooms, if you happen to have a room that is NOT at least 14 inches deep you will find that Revit is unwilling to report either its To Room or From Room parameter. If you've been reading this blog a long time you may remember a post I wrote which included a short video that mentions this issue?

A room like pictured below will work because it is 14" deep.

However the room pictured below won't be recognized and the corresponding parameters will be blank, in this case the To Room parameters.

If you are familiar with the Room Calculation Point (I call it RcP) feature it can be used to influence this issue.

Keep in mind it will also negatively affect which room you can regard as the To Room, if not for this door specifically any other doors that need the opposite behavior.

The Room Calculation Point (RcP) feature was added to doors to provide a way to change how the To Room assignment is controlled. Originally the To Room value for a door was (still is without the RcP being enabled) decided based on the side of the wall the door swings in toward.

There are doors which must swing out of a room but still belong to the room they swing from. For example a classroom's door (like shown in the images above) often swings outward to the corridor (often set into an alcove), for exiting requirements usually. However we still think of and document the door as belonging to the classroom, not the corridor.

If the door is placed so that the panel swings into the classroom (using stock doors) then the To Room parameter is assigned to the classroom. If we then flip its orientation so the panel swings out of the classroom the To Room value remains associated with the classroom (check out the post I mention above for a video of this behavior).

The RcP feature changes that behavior to alter the To Room value to follow the flip of the door orientation regardless, which means in my example, and the images above, the To Room value would change to reference the Corridor instead.

May you have sliverless designs...

Doors and Rooms and Rooms and Doors

In the year 2016 we find Revit is still utterly clueless about the relationship between doors and rooms. We have this quirky documentation habit of using a room's number to derive a door number, not to mention it's room name to define its location in a building. I know they've noticed because each door has a From Room and To Room parameter.

Recently Elon Musk and his SpaceX team sent a rocket to space and returned the first stage to an upright position back on earth. A feat engineers have long dreamed of accomplishing.

Yet after 15 years Revit continues to rely on third party applications to bridge this feature crevasse.

Don't get me started on the Space Naming Utility being a separate application...grumble grumble...

Curtain Wall Panel Template - Reporting Parameter Error

If we attempt to attached a Reporting Parameter to a Curtain Panel Template we might see this error message.

It's the result of attaching the dimension to the reference level in the view.

If we are careful to attach the dimension to the reference plane that is lurking underneath it (the reference level) the reporting parameter will attach without complaint. I pulled the Level and the reference plane apart a bit so they can be seen more easily in the image.

Revit 2016 - New Door Content

The What's New documentation for Revit 2016 doesn't mention this but if you look closely you'll find that it provides new door families separated into Residential (19 each) and Commercial (16 each) folders. The residential doors all use Type Catalogs except for the two garage doors (you can see them in the second image below). Revit 2015's Doors folder has 31 doors and Revit 2016 provides 35 (and another 12 you'll see below, for total of 47).

The Single-Flush family you can see in the image above is the same one we've had in past door content. Interestingly I don't see it in the library so I imagine it's a left-over from the stock template. This is what the residential doors look like in 3D with Detail Level: Medium.

The new doors feature nested hardware (visible with Detail Level: Fine) and new options, such as Swing Angle (doors that swing), Panel Open (pocket doors), Show Grill, Masonry Frame, Threshold and Masonry Inset. Those are just the ones I've noticed so far. They aren't available in every door, just those that the options make sense for. For example, in this image you can see a pocket door is selected and it has a Panel Open parameter, the image shows it is open.

This image shows a couple options for the single full glass door; Swing Angle and Show Grill.

When you switch Detail Level to Fine you can see the hardware and some families have additional trim. This image shows the hardware and a pair of separate sidelight families. I didn't take the time to see if I could make them fit the adjacent doors better.

These are the new Commercial door families, there are Type Catalogs for all but one of them (Door-Passage-Uneven-Flush).

This is what they look like in plan and 3D views. I've loaded and placed one type from each family.

There are door families (12 each) on their own within the Doors folder and several use Type Catalogs (6 each). You'll also find the three Curtain Panel Doors we are used to seeing in the library though they've been renamed a little. In fact all doors now include Door- as a prefix to declare their category. The curtain panel doors are always a source of confusion because they are doors in a door folder that can only be placed in the model by swapping them for a curtain panel.

They've also provided Hardware families in a separate folder, which are the families used on the doors that feature hardware.

I think they overlooked the Bi-fold (closet style) door families that are in the previous library, I don't see an equivalent version among the new doors.

I should also mention that these new doors don't resolve the Copy/Monitor issue with Walls and Openings. You can see in the upper wall at the right end that the pocket door has generated a much larger opening in the wall than it really should.

The only door families that create proper openings with C/M are those that use nested families for all the geometry and only the opening is defined in the host family. These new doors aren't built that way.

Door Template Wall Types

Prior to Revit 2015 the stock door template had one wall type called Wall 1. Many users create additional wall types to make it easier to test our work for problems that can arise with different wall types (those with a different thickness), prior to loading into a project to test further.

A very subtle change with 2015 is that the stock door template now has three types: Generic - 6", Generic - 8" and Generic - 12". The metric door template has Generic - 150mm, Generic - 200mm and Generic 300mm.

I assume this is in response to observing that many people have be doing with this with their own content. It's been part of my door tutorials and sessions over the years. It's one less subtle task to deal with when starting out with a new door family.

Copy Monitor Walls and Openings

I've mentioned in the past that we need to be careful using the Copy/Monitor (C/M) tool on walls when we use the option Copy windows/doors/openings.

When Revit examines the geometry of the family used to create the opening in the C/M'd wall it looks at the overall geometry to define the opening's size. That's usually not good because trim on the face of the wall does not define the opening required. The stock door families (and windows) are good/bad examples of this in action.

This is an opportunity to bring up another advantage of creating doors like described in A Door's Life, they behave when you use C/M. Why do they behave? There isn't any native geometry in the host door family. The frame, door panel, swing and hardware geometry are all based on nested families and the C/M tool doesn't "see" them when it creates the equivalent opening in the C/M'd wall.

Here's a comparison based on stock and not stock doors, in plan view.

The openings created from the stock doors are as large as the trim elements that surround the opening of the door (3" wide trim). The openings for the not stock doors as as large as the opening in the host family and all the nested components are designed to fit inside the opening that's used in the family. The nestedness of all the components prevents them from being detected by C/M.

Here's the elevation of the same doors.

Creating Door Families

Long post warning!

I wrote supporting documents for two presentations I did about using the family editor and creating door families, they are:

Autodesk University 2005 Session BD21-1L: Autodesk Revit Building Family Editor: From the Beginning (using Revit 8.0) - Download It
Central States Revit Workshop 2013: A Door's Life (using Revit 2013) - Download It

I also wrote an earlier post here and shared A Door's Life as a Box embedded document.

I recently responded to questions about the techniques the older handout describes and then, as the thread grew, later criticism at RFO that my second document does not live up to their experience with the original. The following stream of consciousness is, for the most part, my reply there. I have rewritten parts of it so hopefully it makes sense here apart from the thread at RFO.

If you work through each document, or have already, the following describes what I experienced writing the newer version; why I didn't find it practical to just "refresh" the original, though I did start out thinking I could just do that. I started by opening the AU 2005 BD21-1L handout word documents and using Save As. Fwiw, that document was created using Word's Master and Sub-document concept (think Xref's for Word), each section is a separate document linked to a master for formatting, style setting and page numbering.

When I first started pondering (over 18 months earlier) what became "A Door's Life" I was thinking about a session for RTC in Europe. Coincidentally I received two suggestions via email within a couple weeks of each other recommending the AU 2005 handout should be updated. One even said he'd do it and submit it as a class for AU, asking if I'd have any objections. I wrote back that I didn't have any objections. I don't think he did it though, at least not that I'm aware of.

Reviewing the original outline I added the section about nesting hardware because its more common outside the USA to include hardware in door families (thinking about RTC EUR). I decided to remove the section devoted to creating the nested variable lite panel family with voids because, during the eight years of work and travel I've done since the lab at AU, I've never met anyone actually using it (until the thread at RFO). It's a relatively complicated and labor intensive part of the document too.

In its place I described creating two simpler nested panels, one derived from the first since that's how many firms actually end up going through the process. This also meant I could put the more relevant (especially in 2013 than 2005) clearance form (part of the nested swing) and hardware section in without increasing the page count too much. When CSRW submissions were requested I was already restructuring the handout (it is in imperial units) and I decided to use it for their workshop instead and took a different direction with the RTCEUR session. After a bit of reformatting it became a CSRW session and I finished it.

As such, the final form of A Door's Life is based loosely on the CSRW template, I started with it but I took some liberties. The AU 2005 BD21-1L handout is 48 pages and the font is primarily Arial 11 and based on the AU 2005 template. In contrast A Door's Life is 80 pages (3 pages are the Table of Contents, no ToC in AU BD21-1L) and uses the fonts; Calibri 11 and Cambria 10 (for lists). As a result the appearance is certainly different (see next image).

The tips (and additional comments) are a burgundy color to fit the color of the CSRW template graphics (see left image).

Doing the writing and editing I was immediately confronted with images of the Revit Building 8.0 user interface that included the Design Bar, Menu and Toolbars. When I finished the work I'd ended up replacing nearly every image. Even images that didn't need to be looked so out of place against the new interface that I often chose to replace them anyway. It's like remodeling a room that is connected to others. Improvements in the room make the other rooms look shabby.

There are also the feature and language changes from 2005 to 2013. Every instruction and description that referred to Design Bar tab, Menu or Toolbar had to be replaced with references to ribbon tabs, panels, buttons, properties palette, and other subtleties. There are also new, perhaps better, choices for how to offer some instructions, via right click, palette, view control shortcut bar etc.

There are changes in Revit itself like the behavior of the nested swing family. Between 2005 and present day the swing technique described in the 2005 handout doesn't work anymore. It's necessary to constrain it a little differently, the text of the old process had to go. The nested swing in A Door's Life has more features to describe as well. The clearance form section nearly takes up as much space as the panel/void section did in the AU 2005 handout. The clearance form describes a much more valuable lesson, in my opinion, about constraining sketches as well as the whole concept of clearance forms which isn't part of the original at all.

I think its worth mentioning that over eight years I've changed. I've been affected by the people I've met, taught and all the work I've done since. I've learned a lot more about Revit, this business, writing, editing, document formatting etc. I've done technical editing for two Revit books (beginning another now) and contributed chapters to two editions of another. My opinions and approach to writing and describing things has changed, evolved. I'm a different person than I was in 2005 and I learned a LOT from doing that lab too. I find it hard to imagine I could look at work I did eight years ago and be satisfied with "Save As"...and I wasn't. I also did not intend or expect either document to define a singular process to build "your" perfect door family. I hoped to describe the techniques that can be used together or separately to help organize anyone's own door library and all the concepts apply/extend to any other content easily too.

I closed my response in the thread with "I am grateful that you've found the original document useful and worthy of the praise, that it deserves to be updated. I won't hide my disappointment that you find the newer version not as worthy of your praise. I guess what they say about sequels is really true."

Curtain Walls and Doors

This is an echo from 2012, not that old but a situation that frequently frustrates new users.

There are two situations that trip up new users when it comes to doors. I wrote about about one of these Reviteristics in April 2010. That post is about Openings and this one is about curtain wall panel doors.

When people first make a curtain wall that is supposed to get a door they quite naturally assume the door tool is the right place to start. Wrong. Curtain walls are special and they are made up of curtain grids, panels and mullions. A curtain wall door is really a curtain wall panel. They are a panel because Revit needs to keep their width and height flexible, to accommodate any changes we might make. A regular door family can vary in size but it can't respond to curtain grids being moved. We can't even put a regular door in a curtain wall. That's not entirely true but I'd have to get into yet another Reviteristic, using other wall types as curtain wall panels.

We need to understand that a door in a curtain wall isn't a "door", at least not to the Door tool. To make matters a bit more confusing Revit treats this curtain wall panel, pretending to be a door, as a door in schedules and in Visibility/Graphics.

It would be better if we could click on the Door tool and have the option to place a "regular" door or a "curtain panel" door. At least this way it would become immediately apparent that there is a difference!

Curtain wall panel doors are found in the Doors folder within the content library. That seems slightly logical, in the same way that Opening families are found there. When we want to load a curtain wall door family, browse to the door library (stock content location).

Placing a curtain wall door is a bit different than a regular door in a wall. We don't use the Door tool. We have to swap out the panel that should be a door with the curtain wall door family that you loaded. To do this we need to use the TAB key to select the panel and then use the Type Selector to choose the curtain wall door family instead.

Once you do this you'll have to make sure that the curtain grids and mullions are adjusted to report the desired size. If you set the grids and mullions before the door is in place you'll find that the size is not quite the clean numbers you probably wanted. You can resolve this with mullions that use different offset values or just re-position the curtain grids until you get a cleaner door size.

I captured another video in the "Five Minutes with..." theme.

If you want to create a new curtain wall door family you ought to examine and/or reverse engineer the stock one first. You can start from scratch with the family template (Door - Curtain Wall.rft)

A Doors Life

As I mentioned in an earlier post I presented a session called "A Door's Life" at the recent Central States Revit Workshop. It tackles creating a host door family that nests 2 panels, 2 frames and 2 handles. It also features a nested clearance form for clash detection and a variable plan swing angle. The host door permits rotating the 3D panel and hardware to any angle as well, though 0-180 is probably the range that's most useful.

If you are interested in more information this is the handout that attendees received (embedded here).

As the handout will tell you it isn't meant to be the perfect door. It's a demonstration of concepts and how to put them all together. If you're lucky you'll end up with something you can use right away or at the very least have a good idea how to get where you want to go.

Click to Download the completed files for each exercise.

Change Door From and Door To

These settings for doors are determined initially by which side of a wall the door swings into. A door swinging into a room inherits that room as its "to" value. Later if someone flips the door to swing out of the room the parameter does not change. This is intentional and I've written about this before.

Harry started Boost Your BIM a few months ago and he's really dedicated himself to it, bravo! Back then he asked me for some ideas and naturally my mind went blank I could only muster a couple ideas. The beauty of blogging is that the more readers you have the more ideas you'll get. He's been keeping busy with many interesting examples.

The other day I was chatting with a Revit user who was expressing frustration with the From/To issue and I thought that a simple "click this click that" experience might at least improve the situation for him. I wrote to Harry and a day or so later we've got this to consider. Cool!

The Missing Door

There are two situations that trip up new users when it comes to doors. I wrote about about one of these Reviteristics in April 2010. That post is about Openings and this one is about curtain wall panel doors.

When people first make a curtain wall that is supposed to get a door they quite naturally assume the door tool is the right place to start. Wrong. Curtain walls are special and they are made up of curtain grids, panels and mullions. A curtain wall door is really a curtain wall panel. They are a panel because Revit needs to keep their width and height flexible, to accommodate any changes we might make. A regular door family can vary in size but it can't respond to curtain grids being moved. We can't even put a regular door in a curtain wall. That's not entirely true but I'd have to get into yet another Reviteristic, using other wall types as curtain wall panels.

We need to understand that a door in a curtain wall isn't a "door", at least not to the Door tool. To make matters a bit more confusing Revit treats this curtain wall panel, pretending to be a door, as a door in schedules and in Visibility/Graphics.

It would be better if we could click on the Door tool and have the option to place a "regular" door or a "curtain panel" door. At least this way it would become immediately apparent that there is a difference!

Curtain wall panel doors are found in the Doors folder within the content library. That seems slightly logical, in the same way that Opening families are found there (Edit: Openings have their own folder beginning with version 2012). When we want to load a curtain wall door family, browse to the door library (stock content location).

Placing a curtain wall door is a bit different than a regular door in a wall. We don't use the Door tool. We have to swap out the panel that should be a door with the curtain wall door family that you loaded. To do this we need to use the TAB key to select the panel and then use the Type Selector to choose the curtain wall door family instead.

Once you do this you'll have to make sure that the curtain grids and mullions are adjusted to report the desired size. If you set the grids and mullions before the door is in place you'll find that the size is not quite the clean numbers you probably wanted. You can resolve this with mullions that use different offset values or just re-position the curtain grids until you get a cleaner door size.

I captured another video in the "Five Minutes with..." theme.

If you want to create a new curtain wall door family you ought to examine and/or reverse engineer the stock one first. You can start from scratch with the family template (Door - Curtain Wall.rft)

Party Wall Doors

You know the doors that are in hotels that pass between rooms. They make it easy to rent two rooms side by side, one for kids, one for the parents...or co-workers traveling to a meeting etc. I got a question via email asking how to approach this. The issue expressed was that Revit won't let you put two doors on top of each other. They want to list two doors in the schedule (one for each side) so the more or less obvious solution of showing both panels and swings in one family didn't cut it.

One solution is to edit the door family and eliminate the Opening element and replace it with a void instead. This allows you to adjust the depth of the void so it only cuts one half of the shared wall. Place two doors and align them...voila, done. If you make this an instance parameter driven option your regular single flush door type could pull double duty, cutting all the way through a wall or only half way.

Another approach could be a single family that uses two nested (and Shared) families. The door could be assigned to the Generic Model category so the assembly doesn't schedule in a door schedule, the nested shared doors (assigned to the door category) do instead. Alternatively the category could be assigned to doors too but you'd either have to filter out the assembly or the individual doors because you'd have an "extra" door.

Whatever solution we use we do have to consider how "we" schedule doors and how the product is dealt with by a manufacturer. Since the frame has to built to accomodate two panels it might actually be better or correct to create a single door family that just happens to have two panels. Everything is a bit trickier the deeper you look at the question, at least when you aren't just concerned with what a door looks like in a plan view drawing.

The Door From and To Values

In October of 2009 I wrote a post that explains the way Revit determines the parameter From Room and To Room settings. This is just an echo of it because I've seen a few mentions of the issue lately elsewhere on the "internets". There's a video too!

Marvin Window Content Updated

Received an email this morning letting me know that Marvin Windows has update their Revit content, they wrote:

We are happy to inform you that we have posted about 41 different Revit families to our Marvin Revit Page.

We want to thank those of you who helped us test these families and for spending the time to write and tell us your comments. We were able to incorporate many of your requests in our families. We hope these families will be an asset to you. Take care and please let us know if you have any comments, complaints or questions.

Dept. of Reviteristics - Openings are Doors

No they are not, at least not the stock openings. Wall openings are parked in the folder for Doors but they are really Generic Models (using the stock content).

They put them in separate categories because many firms don't include openings in door schedules. Then they confuse matters by dropping them in the Door folder. There is no Generic Model folder in the stock Content, there probably ought to be.

Unfortunately this leads to a bit of confusion with new users as they load a door but find that they are not listed among the doors. So they try loading them again (they ought to be in your template already by the way but they aren't in the stock templates). Still no door/opening family. I'm not certain how they get past this but I'm guessing that they ask someone, visit a forum or just start poking at the listed categories in the Project Browser. They may just start trying different tools, like Component instead of Doors which, surprise, offers them the opening families.

I wrote that I believe that there ought to be a better process to place components back in March 2007. That was when we had a Design Bar instead of the ribbon and we still don't have a more refined way to do it. I don't know that my old suggestion makes as much sense in the context of a ribbon. I just know that scrolling through long lists of families either in the Type Selector or the Project Browser seems a bit crude when the components are all categorized nicely already. Does it really make sense to have trees and shrubs in the same list with casework? I suppose it does if you are using plant families as part of the interior design? Revit MEP has a bit nicer work flow for each discipline and the electrical devices process is nicer still.

That's why I think this Opening is a Door, but isn't, is a Reviteristic

Doors and Scheduling To Room From Room

Revit door schedules can include a parameter for From Room and To Room. The way a door determines which is which depends on how you place the door. The door is To a room when the swing is defined into that room initially. When you place it the other way then the To value is based on the adjacent area, like a corridor.

Further, when you change the From or To Room values in a schedule Revit will honor your choice and toggle the other to the opposite value. If you just flip the door in the plan view though the schedule does not change. This is intentional.

A door may need to swing into a corridor for exiting but technically belong to the room and therefore the To value should not change. This may be the exception to the rule but that's how it works.

I created a video that demonstrates this a bit. I also mention a limitation that was mentioned in a post about this at AUGI. The limitation is how thin a room can be before the door no longer can generate a To Room value in the schedule. The magic number is 14", in my testing, any thinner and no To value.

If you want to listen and watch here instead...

Door "Templates"

Some time ago I mocked up a few "template" family files that were configured for some common door situations I ran into. I call them templates because that's how I used them but I never bothered to change their file extension to .rft.

They had the 2D plan display that I wanted but no 3D panels since that was what I seemed to keep changing all the time. These represented a way to get "up and running" from scratch a little quickererer. When I needed a new door with a "special" panel I just grabbed one of these, added the panel, then loaded it into my project and got back to work.
These examples include the 2D swing family I created as part of my Autodesk University lab. I posted the handout for that HERE earlier. They also include a pair of extra reference planes that define the "required" offset from adjacent perpendicular walls so that a user can use the Align Tool to position a door very accurately easily according to this "standard" setting.


There is an Inset parameter to allow moving the door in and out of a wall.

I upgraded them to 2009 and posted them HERE if you are interested in tearing them apart.

Doors and Frames and such

Back at the end of 2005 I presented a class at Autodesk University that attempted to cover a door family. It was too aggressive in scope to fit into the lab session but I think it was a good subject nonetheless. I've posted the handout HERE for anyone who might be interested in it now.


I get an email now and then asking about it and decided after getting another today to post it which will hopefully make it easier for people to find it.