Sunday, April 13, 2008

Cleaning Family Templates

So like many users, you have tried to desperately get rid of stubborn reference planes and labels/dimensions that show up whenever you create a new family from a stock template. You probably tried hitting the Delete key harder and harder, to no avail. But where there's a will, there's a way!

What you need to do is to rename your rft templates to rfa (as a precaution, always make a copy to experiment on) and open the rfa family in Revit. You can now delete all the reference planes and labels/dimensions. Note that parameters cannot be removed (maybe someday I'll stumble on a way to do that, but I highly doubt it!). Click the video below for a demonstration of how this is done for a casework family template.

Cleaning out a Casework Family Template


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6 comments:

coreed said...

hi Dave,
just though you would like to see what you got us doing at RevitCity
since i don't see you there to often as at AUGI. but i'm not at AUGI that much.

http://www.revitcity.com/forums.php?action=viewthread&thread_id=10999

http://www.revitcity.com/forums.php?action=viewthread&thread_id=10993

Dave Baldacchino said...

LOL! Now that Jing is going to gain so much usage, we'll be charged for it ;)

Yes, I do spend quite some time on AUGI, but I promise to come visit from time to time :)

Anonymous said...

Hi, Dave.
For this as well as a common practice can you simply rename the file extension or do you have to do a save as from revit?
Glenn Nelson

Dave Baldacchino said...

Hi Glenn,

As the video clip shows, all you need to do is rename the extension to rfa and then open the file to remove the unwanted elements. Save it and then rename to rft in Explorer. If you do SaveAs from Revit, it doesn't seem to work.

Anonymous said...

Hi, Dave,

I just saw your tips of deleting the refs in the Family Template. Well, I guess this trick may work, but I have to remind you that all the refs in the Template mean sth and do affect the behavior of family.

So I guess a big risk has to be considered before doing so.

Dave Baldacchino said...

I guess I'll add a disclaimer! I found myself several times needing to remove an un-needed reference. Sometimes for the sake of speed, I just change an un-needed ref plane to be "not a reference" and move it to the side, especially once I've begun working on the family itself. But it does bug me that it's there, "littering" my families, and that's what pushed me to figure out a way to get rid of them. Some of us are quite obsessive ;)

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