Formit object / family creating and control - level control of objects

[john]

I am just starting with Formit. And I have never worked with Sketchup. What I am interested in understanding are two issues.

First off I am a Revit user. My use of levels is for vertical height control of objects. Is there a similar process in Formit? And / or, can a Reference Plan or Line kind of object be used for this kind of control? If so, what is it and how do you engage it?

The second condition is creating a Formit object for use in projects. I have attached an image of a corner window object I created. I made the frame into two objects. The frame along the sill and jambs is one object. And the head is a separate object (I made the glass a separate object as well). All have been grouped with unique names and all are on their own layers. When I place this in a Formit project model I can array the window group so I can obtain the intent. However, when I uncheck the frame head element is turns that off for all the arrayed objects. Is array the best approach? I've tried making the top object unique. But when the head object is turning off in the layers panel it turns them all off.

Any suggestion would be wonderful.

Thanks,

John

[josh.goldstein]

Hi John,

For the first question, FormIt Levels are visual datums. They don't move or control the height of objects. However, once you apply Levels to an object, you can snap to those Level lines while you're moving or adjusting other objects, so you can get objects to the right height relative to Levels. You can read more about FormIt Levels here. 

If I understand your second question, you arrayed the entire window assembly, which means the resulting array will include the exact same objects and Layer assignments as the original object. So yes, it's expected that turning off the Layer in question will hide all top-of-frame elements, because the original top-of-frame object was on that Layer before it was arrayed, and all copies will do the same thing. Arraying is no different than copying, so this would be the same with copy/paste.

When you say you place the object in FormIt, I assume you mean via Import or the Content Library, which means the entire window assembly and all of its elements will be placed into a single containing group (let's call it the container). When you array this container, all resulting container copies are still tied to the original, which means that if you wanted different Layer assignments for the sub-groups in only some copies, you'll need to either ungroup them, or make them Unique.

Note that Make Unique will also make all sub-elements unique, so you'll be disconnecting the Unique instance and all of its children from the original. Alternatively, you could use the "Make Unique (non-recursive)" function in a plugin called Properties Plus (available via the Plugin Manager, the plug icon on the right side). This tool makes the container unique, but doesn't make any of its children unique. When running this tool on a selected instance, you'll be able to make changes in that container only, including putting the sub-elements on different Layers without affecting the other containers (which is what I think you're after), but editing the individual sub-elements (shapes or sizes of the sill geometry, for example), will still propagate to the other copies of the window geometry in the model.

Hope this helps.

[john]

Thanks Josh,

I know how to create levels - applying them is issue. I will take a look at the link.

You are correct regarding the container process. If I were doing this in Revit I would assign the top head frame element to a instance parameter so I can toggle it off and on. 

Thanks for your response and help,

John