Tag: category

Create a Component Family with Category set to Walls (or other system family category)

Luke Johnson

Have you ever wanted to make a Component Family with the Category set to Walls?  Or Roofs?  Or some other system Category?  There are no templates for this, and it doesn’t show up in the Family Category dialog box, so you may think that you limited to using In-Place families when you want the category to be Walls, Roofs or similar.

Think again.

An interesting offshoot of the method that I described at this link is that when you save the In-Place family as an RFA, it adopts the Category that it had AS an In-Place Family!!

In simple terms:

  1. Make an in-place Wall family with some geometry in it.
  2. Save it as an RFA
  3. Load the RFA into your project
  4. It is a Component family with the Category set to Walls!

And guess what – it shows up in a Wall Schedule 🙂  I’m a little scared of what the repercussions of this hack may be, so please use at your own risk.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Cuttable vs Non-cuttable Family Category Properties

Luke Johnson

One easy way to determine if a family Category is Cuttable is by looking in the Object Styles dialog box. If there is a gray box in the ‘Cut’ column, that Category is not cuttable. See image below (from 2012):

For some further info, you can check out these WikiHelp pages:
Cuttable Families – WikiHelp

Non-Cuttable Families – WikiHelp
However, it would seem that the above lists are not exhaustive…

Also, you can check out my previous post about the subject:
What Revit Wants: Cuttable vs Non-cuttable families

New Revit Families Guide for 2011

Luke Johnson

Wouldn’t it be nice if we got an update version of the Revit Families Guide?
Well, sadly, we don’t have it yet.


You can still access the 2010 version here and the 2009 version here.

I don’t know about you, but I would love an updated Families Guide for 2011.

Some of the information in this guide is invaluable. I have actually requested that Autodesk put together a comprehensive guide relating to Revit Categories (SR# 1-9298685321 – The help file does not describe the unique properties of each Category).

Here is an example of the information in the 2010 guide (this is copyright to Autodesk obviously):