Creating a Generic Casework Family: Modeling and Parameter Flexibility

Let's go ahead and jump back to the reference level, and then we can take a look at some of the different things in the ribbon. And you'll see that we do have some different options here, so it's Create, Insert, Annotate, View, Manage. And it's not exactly the same as what we had in our project, but it's been tailored slightly differently to creating family geometry.

We'll use a lot of the same concepts that we've learned, but we'll just kind of tweak them a little bit to suit the needs of creating the family. This is another button. We kind of touched on this in the last video a bit, but this video will take us into more information on how we're going to be modifying these parameters and adding new types as well from the Family Types option here.

We're going to get started by modeling the simple piece of casework. And doing that, we're going to jump over to our right elevation, and we're going to start really simple by just creating a box. And with that box, we're going to flex all of the parameters to make sure that the box was created exactly the way that we need it to.

So the box is going to be created by using the Extrusion tool. And what the Extrusion tool does is it'll allow us to draw a profile or a shape and then extrude it directly perpendicular to that shape. We can define that extrusion depth with a parameter or a dimensional parameter, as shown here.

The height and depth are defined by the location of these reference planes. So the first thing we'll want to do is jump over to our Create tab, go to Extrusion, and we're going to want to draw this in the simplest way possible because the next step is we want to lock the constraints to each one of these planes here. And the best way to do that is to use a rectangle.

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If we draw a rectangle into this space here, the framework that's already been created for us, you'll notice that after I hit the second click here that all of these padlocks will pop up. And what I'll want to do is if I want them to stay constrained to the location of these reference planes, I'll go in and I'll lock each one of these padlocks. So notice that we have four lines here and we have four padlocks.

Once I've drawn the rectangle and locked all of the padlocks there, I can go ahead and click the green check to finish the edit mode. And now I have the start of my casework family. If I were to go in next and then say change this height parameter from three to four feet, you can see that the casework element that we just created is going to follow along with that parameter.

So I'll just change it back to three feet and then we'll jump over to our reference level and you can see this is the piece that we just created, but we want to make sure that it's associated with this length parameter and this reference plane because this length parameter is associated with this reference plane here, the right reference plane, and the left reference plane. So to do that, what I need to do is I need to align this face to that reference plane and then lock the constraint. And so this is what I call align and lock.

And so from my modify tab, I'll go to align and I want to align this face to the reference plane. So I'll select the reference plane first and then I'll pick the face of my geometry and then click the padlock to lock it in place. Once I've done that, I can hit escape twice to get out of the align command and now we're ready to flex the model and make sure that it moves within the length and the depth parameters appropriately.

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So I will go in, change the length parameter to six feet. When I do that, everything should move together and I'll do the same thing with the depth parameter. I'll change it to three feet and again, everything should move together.

I'm going to go ahead and change this length parameter back to four feet and I'll go ahead and change the depth parameter back to two feet as well. At this point, we don't really want to lose any of the work that we've already done, so it's a good idea to do a save as. I'll go to File > Save As and select Family.

And I'm going to go ahead and save it in my BIM 201 folder and I'm going to go ahead and call this Casework Generic because it's casework, but it doesn't really have any specific parameters to it, so we want to make sure that it's noted as generic so anybody else who goes in and uses this knows exactly what they're getting into. We'll hit save and the next video we'll dive into some more detail.