multifamily best practices

[ahillhouse]

Hello, I'm just wondering how others are approaching populating units within MF projects? Are you modeling the unit types and then creating groups to populate? Modeling one of each unit type and then creating 2d groups to populate? My thoughts are that groups are troublesome for this purpose, and that families would be most appropriate...but you can't include walls in families! At least I don't know how to.

Is there a better option that I'm not thinking of? Back in CAD we used blocks for this purpose, recent Revit conversion so we're trying not to re-invint the wheel. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[rosskirby · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of different options for this type of work, but each has it's benefits and drawbacks, and ultimately you'll have to decide which to use.

Using groups works great for smaller projects.  It's also useful for larger projects, but the model can get a bit heavy.  Just make sure that you don't use hosted families (wall-hosted, floor-hosted, etc.) within the groups, because they don't always play well with groups, especially when you try and place an instance of a group on mulitple levels.

An alternative is to use linked files for each unit type, although that can get kind of complicated if you've got a ton of unit variations, because you'll have to constantly reload into each linked file any changes to families that are in multiple units.

A third option is to use a combination of groups and linked files.  Groups for the families (furniture, etc.) and linked files for the room layouts.

I'd suggest giving each method a try (shouldn't take more than an hour or two per option) to see which you're more comfortable with and which works best in your project.  I'm sure there are other benefits and drawbacks that I'm leaving out, but that's the gist of it.

[ahillhouse]

Thank you for your reply.

We are going with a single instance of each model unit type, modeled in place, but on a workset that is separate from the 2D families (created from the live unit and updated as needed) that populate the model. Seems to be working so far, but can forsee some issues down the line.

A million ways...