I posted this in my introduction, but I feel like it belongs here more.
- Right now, the need for individual engineers to create Families from the ground up is very high. Most manufacturers do not provide high-quality or up-to-date BIM objects, especially not for smaller projects like residential design.
- This places the burden on the engineer at the worst possible time, too; you need Families of your equipment to get started modelling at all, so you frustrate yourself making amateur errors in Family creation, and then have a shaky foundation for the rest of the project.
- A good solution to this would be to find experienced Revit users who are also experienced engineers to make these Families in advance.
- The problem is that most equipment manufacturers aren't quite on board with this idea, or aren't aware of it. I think it could be profitable, done right. The marketing alone would be worth the yearly hours put into maintaining a basic Family database, but the engineers at my firm have expressed that they'd pay good money for a well-designed database of clean MEP equipment Revit Families.
- I am aware Autodesk Seek exists, but these Families are not very clean and, again, are often out of date.