From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

Understanding wall families - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Understanding wall families

“

- [Instructor] The subject of all the videos in this chapter is going to be walls. So I thought it would be good for us to take a high level look at walls before we start on any specific topic. Let's begin the discussion with a reminder of how walls fit into the overall Revit element hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy we have categories. There are many categories, including walls, and they are responsible for making elements behave in ways consistent with their real life namesakes. Categories next branch into families, and there are two varieties. Component or loadable families and system families. The main two distinctions of note between these two are if the family is loadable or if it is editable. Component categories are loadable and editable by the end user. System categories are not. So to use a loadable category you must first load and possibly create a family of that category to make that element available for use. With system categories, loading is not possible nor is it necessary because they are already available within your file. System families are built in, that's what system means. Walls are system families, and this means that all of the wall families that you have available to you are already built into every project and available for your use. But what about the subject of edibility? When I say that you cannot edit a system family, when I say that system families are not editable, what we're really talking about is just at the family level. At the type level you can always edit. So every kind of family, both system and non-system families can have user customizable types. And we frequently do this. Consider the typical process of edit type then duplicate to make a custom version of the type. This can be done for both component categories like doors, fixtures, and furnishings, and we can do it for system categories like roofs, floors, and of course, walls. So to be clear, walls are system families, and this means that we can't edit the wall families themselves. But we can and often do edit the wall types. So when folks talk about different kinds of walls like stud walls, brick walls, or block walls what they're really talking about are different types of a wall family, and specifically in these examples the wall family called basic wall. So just how many wall families do we have at our disposal? There are only three. The first is the basic wall. This is a simple assembly of layered construction where you have one or more layers of material sandwiched together. If you look at that wall in either floor plan or in section you'd see essentially the same thing. The same set of layers would be running in both directions. That's why they're called a basic wall. The structure is basic in the sense that it's the same material throughout regardless of how you slice it. The next family is the stacked wall. It's slightly more complicated because it contains two or more basic walls literally stacked on top of each other vertically. So if you slice it in plan you're going to see the structure of whichever basic wall you happen to be slicing through, but if you slice it in section, you're going to see the entire stack. This means that it varies in the vertical direction from what it looks like in the horizontal direction. The third and final wall family is the most complex. It's the curtain wall. This has a complex grid pattern of structure that defines a series of bays running both horizontally and vertically. We can express those bays using a variety of nested sub-components which include mullions and panels. One way to think about the three different wall families is that they get progressively more complex as you move from the basic wall on up to the curtain wall. In the videos that follow in this chapter we're going to consider each kind of wall family and gain some hands-on experience using each one.

Contents