From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

Completing the family - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

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Completing the family

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- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to finish up our pool table with a few final touches, so the first thing I want to do is address materials. So you can apply materials to any of the components within a family. And in this example, I'm just going to focus on the playing surface, so I'm just going to select that extrusion there. And I want to add a material to that that will represent that very recognizable green felt that you usually see on a pool table. So with that selected, I'll scroll down here on the properties palette. And notice the materials and finishes area here. Now, currently, the material is set to by category, which is just that dull gray color that you're seeing there. And you could change it directly by clicking in that field. A small browse button appears, you could click that, and then you could just choose another material. I'm going to cancel that. If you do it that way, you'd be applying that material to it permanently. It wouldn't be flexible, okay? If you want it to be flexible in the final family so that, I'm going to assign this to green felt, but maybe the recipient of this family decides they want to use a different color felt, they would be able to change it. Then what you want to do instead is use this button to associate a family parameter, so I'm going to click that. And at the moment, there are no material parameters in this file, so I'll use this little icon at the bottom to create one. Now, this dialogue looks the same as when we were creating parameters for our dimensions, and that's because that's exactly what we're doing. Is we are creating a material here, so I'm going to call this pool table surface. And it's going to be a type parameter, and it's in materials and finishes. So it's a little different than a dimension parameter because it's now applying to materials instead of dimensions, but otherwise, it's going to behave in a similar fashion. Now, let's click okay, let's scroll down. And you'll notice that the material is now grayed out and is a little equal sign on the associate family parameter button. So let's deselect, and notice that it's still in that dull gray. So we haven't really changed anything yet, but what we've done is we've assigned that material parameter to the geometry, which means that if you go to family types, you now have a new material here called pool table surface. And the reason it's still that gray is because it's still assigned to by category. So this is where we're going to change it now, and we're going to be doing it at the type level instead, so there's a little browse button here, I'll click that, and that brings me back to the material browser. Now, if you scroll through this list, we don't have anything that looks like green felt here, okay? So what we're going to do is use this button down at the bottom and create our own new parameter. So I'm going to choose that, I'm going to right-click it, and I'm going to rename it Green Felt. So there's graphics and appearance over here. Let's go to appearance. Two ways we could do this. We could come down here, and just click right on the color, and choose a green color, and call it done. Or you can use this button up here at the top, which says replace this asset. And when you do, it brings up a library that has lots of predefined materials, so we could start by seeing, is there an existing felt material in here? And when I search for felt, nothing comes up, but I've got something that's similar. We could search for fabric, and lots of things come up. So down here under appearance, I'm going to click the fabric branch, start scrolling down, and you can see all the different kinds of fabric that are in this library, and that includes this one called Fabric Green. That looks pretty good, so I'm going to use this little double-arrow right here to replace the current asset with the green fabric. Let's close the asset browser, and now, this is the result. So it's using this image here, which is zoomed in really close, but it's kind of got this weave here where you're actually seeing the texture of the fabric. And of course, it's in this greenish color. Now, one more thing, let's go back to graphics. And here, it's still gray, but what we're going to do is synchronize it with the render appearance by checking this box. And now, notice that it matches that same green color. We'll click okay again. And now, let's click apply. And now, that green color shows up on the surface of our pool table. However, that's just for the large type. If you go to the small type and click apply, it goes back to gray because that material is still set to by category. So just click there, and browse again, choose the green felt, click okay, click apply. And now, if you go between either of the sizes, they will both use the same material, so that takes care of the material. Feel free to add other material parameters for the rest of the pool table, if you like; for the legs, and the bumper rail, and all that, but I'm going to move on. And what we're going to do next is go to the Create tab and insert a component. Now, this is just like inserting a component in a project. When you do, it will say, "You don't have any component families loaded "in this project. "Is it okay to load one now?" And I'm going to answer yes here. And then in the Exercise files folder, in Chapter 14, I've created a file for us called Cues and Balls, and this is the pool table accessories. We're going to open that up. This is what we call a face-based family. We've seen some examples before with lighting fixtures, but look at the way it behaves. You could actually assign this to any surface. You could attach it to any surface of the pool table. Well, obviously, the surface that makes sense is the top surface. I'm going to tap the Spacebar to rotate at 90 degrees, and then I'm just going to kind of position it right about here, and click. I'll click the modify tool to cancel out. Now, that's very similar to another example we saw when we were doing a furniture schedule. You may recall that we had a table and chairs family. And remember, that the table was the parent family, but nested inside of it were several chairs. And we were able to select those chairs and count them on the schedule. This is kind of the same idea, so these accessories here are a separate nested family that lives now inside of our pool table family. So our pool table family is essentially complete now, so I'm going to save it. And then here in the background, I've got a version of the condominium building open and ready to go. So the last step in any family editor exercise is you should load the family into a live project and test it out, so that's why I've got this file open here in the background. Now, there's a button right here that will let me do that, load into project, that would leave the family file open. If you're done with the family file, and you want to close it, and put it away, you can use this one instead, load into project and close. That's the one I'm going to do. You're going to see all four windows of the family file close. It displays the project that we have open in the background. I'm going to zoom in here, and there's a rec room right here, and I'll just click somewhere to place that in the rec room. Click the modify tool to cancel out, come back, and select it. Notice that both sizes appear right here. There's the large, there's the small. We can choose whichever one we want. If you really want to get a good look at this family, we can look at it in 3D. So what I'm going to do is use the dropdown on the 3D view button, choose camera, extents of the view with the little grip controls on any of the four sides, and you can adjust the way it is shaded here. So if I choose shading, you'll see that green color come through from the material. If you really want to see that material, you can switch to realistic, and it will show the texture on the wall here, but it will also start to show that texture on the surface of the pool table as well. So that is our complete pool table family loaded into a project. And I highly recommend that you get in the habit of doing that, of loading it into a project as a final test just to make sure that everything is behaving the way that you expect.

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