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Better Built-In Revit Families

Better Built-In Revit Families

Let's admit it, we all throw a bunch of money at Autodesk every year. They could take some of that money and invest it in getting us some better built in families. I mean, really, some of this stuff looks like it was created in a high school drafting class. When is the last time you have seen a urinal that looks like this?

 

Darin_CWP_0-1616006918467.png

Darin_CWP_1-1616006928614.png

This toilet was modeled with its seat on backwards...

Darin_CWP_2-1616006963938.png

Darin_CWP_3-1616006972211.png

Is this what we have come to accept from a product that is supposed to be at the forefront of the industry. We disserve better (or at least should expect better for our $$$).

 

 

24 Comments
info
Explorer

 

Dear Sir/Madam,

 

I’d like to place on record my fondness for the software and the advantage it has brought to the Architecture industry. However, I have some feedback regarding revit families (RFA) which I would like to be passed on to the software development powers that be.

 

What the hell is going on? When was the Pre-installed Revit library last updated? It seems like we have the same library from 2008!!! For a product that costs thousands of pounds/dollars for a network license for collaboration, it is utterly appalling.

 

I have been using Revit in an Architect firm for nearly 4 years and have been championing the software during my firm’s transition from AutoCAD and sketchup. It is hard enough trying to convince the nay-sayers of the benefits of Revit when they are so stuck in their ways and backwards thinking, especially when you try and edit the standard families and they end up like this:

Speciality_Equipment_Escalator_w-Steps.JPG

 

Apologies for the language, but seriously, WHAT THE F**K IS GOING ON AND WHO BUILT / IS BUILDING THESE PIECES OF S**T?!?!

 

I know you can get families from some manufacturers but a lot of them aren't built very well and most don't have BIM models available for their products, from my experience.

 

Please can you invest some of your profits into improving your Revit family library and the quality of the families themselves. A colleague of mine showed me the equivalent in ArchiCAD and what they are doing makes a mockery of the Revit families.

 

Please sort this out because it is letting the user base down and causing delays to projects – especially when you go to edit/duplicate a family and it freaks out and says “no, sorry, I can’t change this escalator from 4000mm to 2650mm”. This then fuels the backwards thinking AutoCAD guy in resisting to embrace Revit and helping the industry move forward - which it is struggling to do.

 

By having a more complete, comprehensive and clean family library that comes installed with the software, Architects and other professionals will benefit greatly in delivering the service they aspire to.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts, and I HOPE, some productive action is taken on this. 

Tags (5)
KM_Springfield
Advocate

Some of the window files are likewise "broke"

Prlx_AaronM
Contributor

Thats brutal. 

 

Highly recommend not even installing the OOTB library.  I can help you with some vertical circulation content, if you want to consider using a 3rd party for it. 🙂

sarsenault2CCSS
Advisor

Your firm did not create it's own family library?

sasha.crotty
Community Manager

@info, thanks for sharing your thoughts. We understand the importance of having good content available to our customers, so we appreciate your feedback. Hopefully we can make these experiences better going forward. In the meantime, we've filed a bug to deal with the escalator family you included. 

 

@KM_Springfield, looks like you're located in the UK. There was indeed a few issues with windows families in the UK library. These were fixed in Revit 2017.2. 

JanUsinger
Enthusiast

I don't think that at this stage Autodesk is responsible for good content any more.

The industry (manufacturers) have to a large extend embraced Revit and are providing (good) content already.

 

However, you still need one person in your office who is able to create parametric content to adjust (at the very least) downloaded 3rd party content.

 

Better Revit families with capabilities that Revit offers:

parametric families, ifc export ready, with good looking materials properties for rendering etc.

BIMobject is great, but I think that Revit content should have the "perfect generic families".

Tags (5)
wr.marshall
Advisor

You Can get Families from Revit City - https://www.revitcity.com/index.php.

 

What works for you won't necessarily work for the next person. Mostly due to standards & building materials in a location. If look at USA in some parts the build with brick and other parts wood. A Door for a Wood house won't necessarily work for a brick house. And on a global side a Door for USA won't necessarily work for UK. Even in same location people have different standards. So what is perfect? Best to learn how to create families suited for your own purpose and standards(Office/Location/Suppliers). Though KISS - Keep It Straight & Simple, as Revit doesn't like to get too mechanical. There other issues too:

 

Download - Increases download size (even physical media like CD/DVD/Flash Drive... Have limits in space)

Detail Level - How Detailed do yo want it, Door, D w Iron Mongery, D w IM & dents..... 

Parameters - Basic H x L x W or include thickness of that and radius of this. A few or a million parameters ? (What do half of them even do?)

Office Standards - ie sub categories do not comply with office standards

List can go on and on....

 

 

@wr.marshall these are the questions that Autodesk should address.

There are many websites with Revit content, but those have thousands or millions of .rfa files with very often poor quality.

Of course, it is impossible to create one content library to rule them all.

But It would be much better if the default content would be updated and created as best ass possible.

 

Download size and regional aspect: during installation, you pick which libraries you want to download for me:

polish SI and international SI for someone else UK IP. 

Level of detail or level of information.. LOX, in general, is not a trivial question but doable.

LOXLOX

kimberly.fuhrman
Autodesk

Hi, @Darin_HDR 

I certainly can understand your frustrations. This topic has been posed before, several times. What do you think about combining these posts?

 

Can Autodesk prepare better Revit content families? - Autodesk Community

SORT OUT THE REVIT FAMILY LIBRARY PLEASE!!!!!!! - Autodesk Community

 

Thank you for your submission!

Kimberly

wr.marshall
Advisor

@bartlomiej.tokarzewski another source for Revit Familys is BIM objects.(If you have not come across it yet). This offers many different familys from various suppliers. In addition you can find content for other programs like AutoCAD, 3DS Max, AC by GS.....

 

@kimberly.fuhrman please combine the following links with this feed

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/sort-out-the-revit-family-library-please/idi-p/6897941 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/better-built-in-revit-families/idc-p/10165283#M37238 

Darin_HDR
Advocate

@kimberly.fuhrman, please explain what combining the posts does. If it joins all the votes together that would be awesome. If it buries this new post in an old forgotten post, I'm not so interested it that. Maybe you could combine the old posts with this new one. Now that I say that, that should probably be the standard so that when someone brings something up that has been brought up years ago (and Autodesk still has not done anything about), that the conversation stays fresh, not hidden away in a post from years ago that has lost steam only because people don't scroll through hundreds of pages (isn't there like 500+) of idea requests.

kimberly.fuhrman
Autodesk

@Darin_HDR  You absolutely nailed it! I will combine the older posts with this one, so this one stays in the latest ideas, and merge the votes to give the topic a boost. Sound ok?

Darin_HDR
Advocate

@kimberly.fuhrman, that would be great. Thanks for working on this and keeping everyone's ideas organized better. 

kimberly.fuhrman
Autodesk

@Darin_HDR  Thank you! It is certainly a challenge!

 

-Kimberly

ipselute
Advisor

I believe Autodesk should buy a company like: https://www.bimobject.com/en/product?category=139&sort=trending

and link the "real objects" library into the Revit software directly. Just make it part of the Autodesk Store. The internal family library will never be up-to-date. You would need an entire department (dozens of people) constantly checking families all-year-round version-to-version back-to-back. And you'd still end up with some generic products, not real products from real companies.

Stop this "generic stuff" non-sense: you can't buy generic pizza, you have to choose a real one.

This real stuff could also include prices, so we could calculate real costs upfront. (e.g. total costs of doors, furniture, appliances, etc).

But the real genius would be to have the ability to add real products as family types into these generic families, so we can do a cost analysis between similar objects. So we could "cut the costs" in real time.

Prlx_AaronM
Contributor

With respect, thats a gross oversimplification of what could/would-need to happen.

 

1. Buying BIM-Object wouldnt get you anything, besides a lot of geometry and product data to start with.

 

Also, btw, Autodesk DID used to have a Content Site, called Seek. They ditched it (i believe, to BIM Object) because it wasnt doing all that well and the content wasnt a very high level of quality.

 

2. The real complexity is in having each subset of objects built and templated the same way, so they can all interact the same way. For instance: Toilet Flush Valves. If American Standard, Toto, Zurn, and all the other manufacturers, dont ALL decide to make them the same Revit Way (Face based vs unhosted vs WPB, with the same constraints, etc) then they cant be efficiently sub componentized in the actual Toilets and Urinals, and then you have the worst workflow ever, for design teams that have to manually cobble stuff together.

 

Thats where the "Generics" come in. A lot of what my team does, is just organize and streamline to make sure items that represent manufacturers, all work the same way.

 

3. The pizza analogy completely isnt a 1 to 1. For it to be accurate, youd have to say. "You cant buy generic pizza, you have to buy a real one, but there are rules for what pizza's can have roni, or sausage, or peppers, or cheese, and if your base pizza doesnt allow for one or the other, too bad you are out of luck."

 

4. Adding real manufacturer data in to Generics is very easy, and thats what we do with a lot of our content (like Elevators), because the product data is available and easy to do.

 

5. COST? I doubt it'll ever happen.  Why? Cost isnt whats set by the BPM. Its set by the locale, the distributors, the resellers, and even (to an extent, sadly) the Contractors or Subs able to get them. Im not saying it SHOULD be that way- its a big problem in the industry. But the fact remains, just because American Standard says a toilet costs XXX, doesnt mean itll cost XXX on your job. And who will be on the hook for the cost difference between XXX and XXY, because someone put XXX in a document?

Darin_HDR
Advocate

@Prlx_AaronM agreed completely and my kids love generic pizza (I get the real stuff for myself). To me about 95% of the out-of-box content is acceptable, I have created generic families of my own to substitute for the crappy ones from Revit but my hang up is that I shouldn't have to supplement Revit for the crappy stuff they haven't updated since they were first made 15 years ago by some high schooler modeled from memory  (that is a guess, I don't really know when or how it was created). 

 

Did you know if you are paying for a suite of software (like the Architecture Engineering & Construction Collection), you are paying for things like Character Generator? What may you ask is that? “Character Generator offers artists a web-based laboratory to create fully rigged 3D characters for animation packages and game engines.” So yeah, maybe Autodesk could take our money and put it towards new content we could use (stuff that would be relevant to Architecture Engineering & Construction), and not the ability to do whatever this is.

Darin_CWP_0-1616420862536.png

I don't know about you, but it upsets me that my high cost of Revit (suite) pays for stuff like this, when there are so many better and more relevant things Autodesk could be doing with my money.

 

 

 

 

Prlx_AaronM
Contributor

So, with respect, your reply is sort of delving down in to a lot of assumptions that might not be based in reality, so im going to just kind of ignore some of that, because it isnt productive (Autodesk serves a lot of industries, not just AECC... So unless you have actual financial data that indicates that your AECC subscription paid for Character Generator (i dont need an explanation on what it is, but thanks) thats... not productive.

 

Also, my comment on Generics vs Specifics, was geared towards the post directive above mine that said "Stop this Generic-stuff nonsense." So, thanks for pointing out that you too, use Generic Stuff. As i said, it serves a purpose and thats why it needs to exist.

 

BTW, i dont disagree that the OOTB content should be worlds better. And i know it matters much more, with things like Enscape, Lumion Live, and so on. Thats... why my group is doing what its doing. The honest truth is i dont think they would need an "army," either. More like, a small nimble group that was well versed at building what needs to be built.

 

But telling every manufacturer to do it themselves, and hoping what we end up with is going to be useable for all AEC firms, isnt super practical, either.

Darin_HDR
Advocate

@Prlx_AaronM yeah sorry for the last post (not the newly edited one) you said the same things I did and I meant to respond to  @ipselute, not you. I saw their comment in my email and didn't check to make sure there was not any other additional posts before responding. You responded before I could edit my original post once I sway my mistake. My bad.   

 

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