Swapping furniture for furniture systems

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to take a furniture object placed in a model (say a table) and switch it out with a premade furniture system (say a workstation) without deleting the table and replacing it with the workstation. Basically - is there a simple way to make Revit not limit family swapping to only families in the same category? This comes up a lot at my office for everything from access panels to casework families and we spend time redoing dimensions, tags, etc.

-Trevor

[SteveKStafford · Accepted solution]

Nothing that is built into Revit now. It would take some custom programming with the API to capture the location of the family you'd like to replace and then use that to insert the replacement. It would be tricky because not all families are created with the same notion of origin or placement technique. It's quite likely we could get it swapped with the API but still have to fix the position or orientation of it afterward. In the end that might not feel much different than deleting and replacing.

Revit itself has always been developed with a heavy bias toward category isolation. From their perspective Systems Furniture (Furniture System category) isn't Furniture in Revit, and that's true in the real world for the most part too.

[aaronrumple]

Work Around:

Make a Furniture System family as a placeholder. A simple box will do.

Select all the items you want to change and change them to your placeholder family.

Open the placeholder family. Change the category to Furniture. Reload.

Now you can select all instances of the placeholder and change them to the furniture item you wanted.

[SteveKStafford]

I sure hope he got past this issue...five years ago ;(

Yes, I know the answer is aimed at a new search query arrival 🙂

[aaronrumple]

Still trying to teach the office how to use design options....

Some things never end.

[SteveKStafford]

Preaching to the choir 🙂

[ToanDN]

You could have opened the furniture family and nested in the system furniture family 5 years ago.
In a related note, we normally place system family placeholders and nest in furniture families in later development.