Revit Manufacturers Families Need to Improve

This is the Reayners Masterline window family, found on the BIM objects website. I have nothing against this company. I’m sure they make lovely windows! But the Revit family is one of the worst I have ever seen. Here is why:

• The family contains 239 custom parameters. All of these 239 parameters are “shared parameters”, which means they appear as available fields when creating a schedule inside the Revit project:

• All parameters are instance-based. It means if you want identical instances of the same window, you will have to make sure the instance parameters are the same instead of simply using the same type.

• The family weighs almost 10 MB, which is awful and unacceptable. It will assuredly slow down your model.

• There are so many parameters that trying to move the window causes glitches and slowdowns. Simply flipping the window side is a chore:

• This is what you could call a “super-family”, which contains dozens of options that can be activated by using checkboxes. While superfamilies can be useful in certain cases, this one is completely over-the-top and will assuredly confuse all users.

• There are no instructions on how to use this family. With this level of complexity, users need guidance. Although, to be fair, you would probably need a 200 pages book for this family.

No reasonable Revit user would ever use a family like this. Why does it even exist?

Why Are These Online Families So Bad?

After speaking with a few people in the BIM manufacturers’ content industry, it seems there are a few reasons why these online families are so terrible.

• They are often generated by a script, using families from other software. In other words, there are no human Revit family experts creating these.

• The manufacturers are the clients, so they have the final word. Sadly, manufacturers don’t know much about BIM content, or perhaps they don’t know what are the characteristics of high-quality BIM content. They mostly see the content as advertisements for their products.

• Manufacturers often want all the possible options included and the highest LOD on these families. The problem is that these heavy families are often banned by BIM managers.

• There are no industry-wide standards for BIM content creation. Everyone does their own little thing with no quality control. In an ideal world, BIM Object should reject bad families from being uploaded on their website. But since the manufacturers are the client, they are in a strange position.

• The families are being created for all platforms simultaneously. In theory, we all love openBIM. But realistically, all high-quality families should be built natively.

   

Potential Solutions to Solve This Issue

The standard advice is for everyone to create their own families. While this is probably how you should do it in the current situation, this is untenable in the long term and is a complete waste of time and productive hours.

Our industry needs reliable libraries of content with consistent standards. For this to happen, we’ll need industry-wide standards and the willingness of BIM content platforms to ban bad content. Here are some family creation guidelines for manufacturers:

• Only use shared parameters for parameters that might need to be tagged or scheduled. Use regular family parameters for the rest.

• Avoid superfamilies. Instead, break them down into smaller families and create a container file (see next section).

• Make sure all families are created natively in each software by a human that has experience with BIM content.

• Send the family to a few experienced beta-testers professionals. If your family is bad, you’ll know pretty quickly.

• Audit and peer-review each family before releasing them on a public platform.

The Power of Container Files

To help users understand the content and to avoid superfamilies, an interesting practice is to create container files. Instead of receiving a .rfa file, you receive a Revit file that acts as a menu for you to pick what you need. You can see a showroom of available content. Additionally, you might receive instructions and best practices related to the content.

Promising Practices

There are some interesting emerging practices around.

The first is the Blocks plugin, which provides families made for interior renderings. I was impressed with the quality and consistency of the content. That might be explained by the fact that the customers are the users, not the manufacturers.

BIMSmith has an interesting collection of content. I appreciate that they often include container files that are well organized and easy to use. I’ve been especially impressed with their railings content.

BIMContent.com is an emerging website that seems to understand the importance of high-quality families.

Finally, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with folks over at BIM Objects, and they understand the problems with their content are trying to find ways to make it better. This is not an easy challenge, but with inputs from the community, manufacturers families can get better.