How to Efficiently Add Furniture Using Model Groups in Revit

For this video, we're going to go ahead and add some furniture into some of these rooms here, and we're also going to add some plumbing fixtures to our restrooms. We're going to start with the furniture and we're going to create a prototype office here. Then we'll be able to copy it throughout, and the main point of this lesson is to learn how to use model groups properly so that we can use them effectively as a tool for our project. The first thing we need to do is make sure we have all the families needed for that, so I'm going to go to Insert, Load Family, and I want to go back up to my Imperial Library here and I'm going to look for furniture.

Within furniture, we're going to have a few things that we'll grab. We're going to look for seating, and there are two here that I want to grab, and we can use the CTRL key to grab two at a time: Chair Executive and Chair Task Arm. I can load both of those chairs in at the same time, so I'll click Open, and it'll load those in. Now I can do the same thing: Load Family, and I can back out one folder here and go to Storage, and I'm looking for a two-drawer cabinet file and shelving, and I'll click Open.

With all of those families loaded in, what I could do here is place them now, and if we go to the Architecture tab, you can see there's not a clear button for furniture, so it must be under Component. When I click Component, you can see some of them are already going to start popping up here, but I'm going to start with my desk, so I'm going to go with the desk 72×36 and place the desk in this room here. To place the desk, I want to rotate it, so if I use my Spacebar, I can rotate the desk and place it however I'd like here. That looks good, and then I'm going to add my chair, so I'll continue on with that Component command and I'm going to look for the Executive Chair, which will be the one that goes in the back here. Same thing, we're just using Spacebar to rotate it as we see fit, and then I can place it along the center of the desk here so relatively close is going to be good enough for us here. Then I'll grab the guest chair, which is going to be the Task with Arms, and I'll put that in this location here, and I'm actually going to back these out just a little bit—move the whole thing; it was a little close to the back wall. Okay, and then I'll add the lateral file here, so I'll go back to Component again and we're looking for a two-drawer cabinet file, 30×36×18 lateral file, and I'll set it so it's kind of close to the wall like that. Now we have the basis for our office. The next step is I want to make these a model group because I'm going to use the same layout for all of the different offices throughout the project, so we have 12 offices in here, and the last thing I want to do is make one edit to one of them and have to do it to all—so I'd rather let Revit take care of that redundant operation for me. I'll use the CTRL key and a combination of a crossing, and I want to make sure that I only have furniture elements selected here, so you can see it's telling me that I have five furniture families selected. Then I'll go up and I'll make a group—this is Create Group—and essentially what I can do with this group is give it a name, so I'll call it Office Layout, and now all of these elements are grouped into one. What's cool about that is I can take that one object and, using our Mirror – Pick Axis command (MM), I can quickly add them to each one of my rooms here. This one's a little different because it's got a little space on the top here, but they're all pretty much the same. Now I've gone through and added furniture in all my spaces. I could even go in and use Select All Instances to select the instances of that group in there, and using the copy and paste the line to selected levels, I could quickly also paste them to Level 2. Once you get the hang of the flow of all of these different tools, you can quickly add these types of elements. But now you might be looking at it and thinking, “hmm, what happened to that shelving unit that was supposed to go here?” Well, we forgot to add it, but no big deal because what we can do is add it. So I can go to Component and find the family in my type selector here—I'm looking for Shelving, and we'll use the 36×10×72—and then I can add this in. I want it to be part of the group, so if I want it to be part of this group, I can select the group, go to Edit Group, and then I can use the Add feature to then add an element to my group. If you notice, all the parts of the group are grayed out right now, whereas everything that's not part of the group is not grayed out. If I were to click on that element, you can see now it's part of the group, and when I finish editing the group, it adds that piece of furniture to each one of my groups, and so now I don't have to worry about going through and double-checking to make sure each group has the right piece of furniture added to it.