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Michael Wilson/5 min read

Creating Custom Casework Family in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

Custom Casework Checklist

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Noble Desktop's Revit Certification Course teaches BIM modeling, families, schedules, and the full Revit workflow used by architecture firms.

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In this next set of videos, we're going to go ahead and shift gears a bit and we're going to start looking at how to create our own family content.

In this next set of videos, we're going to go ahead and shift gears a bit and we're going to start looking at how to create our own family content. In the previous lessons and previous course, what we have done is we've used the out-of-the-box content and just modified the types to suit our needs, but here we're going to start learning the tools to create our own custom content. In the Recent Files window, when you first open Revit, we've typically been just dealing with the Models section or just opening up one of our recent files here.

What we're going to do now is we're going to actually start working with this Families section and we're going to create a new family from scratch. And so instead of opening one, we're going to click New, select the English Imperial templates, and look for the Casework Wall-Based template. There are other casework options here. You can see we do have Casework and Casework Wall-Based, and this is one you'll want to use if it was intended to be set up against a wall.

If you're going to create a casework element that is intended to float within a space, then you're going to want to choose the Casework option. When it says wall-based, what we're saying here is that this element will be hosted by a wall. So, like doors and windows, it cannot be placed in the model without a wall present.

For our purposes, Casework Wall-Based is going to be perfect. I'll click Open and then we'll take a look at what we have with some of our options with this family template. Now the reason we chose to use that Casework Wall-Based template is twofold.

Number one, we're creating a piece of casework so it would not make sense for us to use anything else. If we would have done Door or Window or anything like that, then we're essentially creating a family on the incorrect category. If I were to go into the Categories here at the top, this is the Categories and Parameters settings, you can see here that the category of Casework is automatically selected.

And as you recall from previous lessons, category is very critical to a lot of different elements and sorting options within Revit. When we select items and use filter, that option that we see to filter out different items is based on those objects' category. So category is the ultimate sorting factor within Revit.

It's also how we define the different elements within our visibility and graphic overrides. So you can see here that all of the different elements in here are actually identified by category. If I were to create the Casework element on something like Doors, or maybe something that could even be more relevant like Furniture, then if I decided that for whatever reason I wanted to turn off Furniture in my model, you can see all the furniture will turn off in this view.

But then if I had my casework placed, it would go away as well, because it was placed on the wrong category. And then I'd have to figure out why a casework element went away when I had turned off just the Furniture category. So back here in our template, we now understand why we chose the Casework category.

Now we need to understand why we chose the wall-based one. And so in our case here, we're going to go ahead and use one of the walls in our break room as the host for this. And so we want to make sure we have a hosted element template to use to create the casework.

When you look at this template, you can see that there are a few dimensions that have descriptions on them, and there's one that does not. And so the difference here is that a parameter like Length and Depth, and even if we go to one of our side elevations, you can see even Height has been established based on these reference planes that are used to create the framework for the family. So essentially this Height parameter, I can actually just change it here because it is a parameter.

If I wanted to make it four feet, I could easily just jump in, select the dimension, and change the value. Now that parameter is based on values that are shown in our family types. So you can see here the Height is now set to four feet, and if I change it here back to three feet, it'll change in the model as well.

So those two are kind of one and the same thing. What's great though is we could establish multiple types by adding new types here and having multiple different dimensions based on the parameters that we've had selected.