Thursday, June 06, 2013

Scaling Revit Families

Every now and then there seems to be a convergence in the "Revitverse". A series of events, themes and user attitudes and desires emerges. Lately it seems to be the notion of scaling families. Revit has not permitted the arbitrary "make this 2x bigger" unless we could provide all the constraints and parameters that allow that kind of input and result. For example we don't usually ask for a desk or chair to be twice as large. A chair becomes too big to use if so. I believe that this logic prevailed in their choice to be more restrictive about scaling things as arbitrarily as other software allows.

A common thread in scaling lately has been classical architecture and columns. These are defined by ratios and rules to some extent while the sculpting applied to them seems to have much more freedom. Reading other blogs and attending the Revit Technology Conferences and Autodesk University made me plan to write a post that provides some links to the various places that you can find intriguing information on this subject. With the many bloggers focused on Revit it really didnt come as a surprise that somebody beat me to it. That someone is Mark Cronin, who I chatted with in Auckland at RTC. He wrote a summary of resources that you'll find useful, techniques that capitalize on new features as well as one that recalls a longstanding feature that we've all managed to forget about.

Please let me encourage you to read Mark's post for the details since he took the time to compile it in the first place, you really should.

Thanks Mark!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the link! It was good to catch up in NZ. I hope things are shaping up nicely for RTC NA too.

Peter from Maryland said...

Limited scaling - yet another reason why revit just sux ... I'm running out of numbers, counting those reasons.

Scaling should be more available, especially with line-based detail components. The only example that revit programmers seem to be able to imagine is the chair example - however, if each of the dimensions (x, y, and z) could be scaled independently, it would be a very useful tool (sometimes the chair needs to be just a little narrower, so scale x to 0.9). If I link those parameters together, then I can scale the whole thing up or down proportionally.

I don't need MamaDesk to 'protect me' from designing something outside the standard lines.