Revit users often prefer that everyone works in Revit. This allows coordination to be smooth and seamless when everyone’s using the same software. However, more often than not, software coordination is overlooked, not specified, glazed over in meetings, especially for smaller projects. Project Managers tend to skip technical small talk to build rapport with their client. However, this single topic can add disruptions to the project work flow, turning a “quick-and-dirty” project into a “not-so-quick-and-dirty” project, with a side of “what’s taking so long”.
A common scenario is when an architect wishes to design in CAD (they’ve done so for decades and are super quick at it), but the MEP engineer wishes to design in Revit taking advantage of their office’s latest and greatest Revit Family Library. This misalignment in software creates an issue for the MEP engineer specifically if their family library was standardized using face-hosted families. The benefit of face-hosted families is the convenience of snapping and rotating correctly as the family is placed onto the faces of Revit elements. But architectural CAD drawings, being 2D, would not have any “faces” for the Revit families. It’s a headache.
One common work-around is to draw temporary walls or ceilings, place the face-hosted families onto the temporary elements, then delete them leaving the face-hosted families in place. After deleting the temporary element it can move freely. Now you might think “I can copy the host-less family around now since it’s free”. Nope. The new family needs a face to place onto. This makes it impossible to copy a layout of elements into another room. Imagine all the extra work for a medium sized project (they’re working in CAD, it can’t be that big), placing families one-by-one while creating all the necessary temporary geometry along the way.
Other work-arounds are drawing reference planes or temporary levels (for ceiling families such as light fixtures). Reference planes can be left in place, because they don’t print, but imagine placing a reference plane along the edge of every single room. They can get incredibly messy with so many spanning across the entire project, creating a visibility issue for everyone, including other engineers linking in your Revit model (the simple solution is to make sure reference planes are on a reference plane workset, but let’s be real, how many models are clean like that). Levels can be hidden using filters in view templates or placed onto hidden worksets, but levels are 3D elements that others can see when they link in your model, which can cause a lot of confusion and unnecessary emails if other parties aren’t aware, internal or external (remember the architect doesn’t care). Either way, these work-arounds can cause a lot of issues for multi-roomed, multi-ceiling height, multi-story projects.
This gets more complicated during revisions especially when the now host-less family can move freely along its plane, but cannot move perpendicular, forcing the creation of more temporary geometry. Sometimes the family can trigger an error that it lost its host, leaving it completely frozen in place, and picking a new host isn’t an option (Revit being Revit). It’s a massive headache especially for beginners.
If we take a step back, how should the MEP engineering office overcome this specific scenario? Well, one solution is to recreate the family library as floating types, and save them in separate folder for floating families. At the beginning of the project, the team should decide which set they’re going to use because face-hosted and floating families should never be mixed together. The schedules count them as separate types, and cannot be named the same.
Be aware that there is no checkbox option to just swap from hosted to floating families, or vice versa, which means if you started with one type of family the other type must be recreated from scratch. This commonly unknown fact often disrupts projects, causing teams to struggle for a solution during valuable production work hours. There’s overtime for a reason.
Choosing whether to standardize families as face-hosted or floating is one of many critical decisions that can catch projects off guard Building a robust Revit Family Library suitable for varying project setups is a strategic investment that pays off in the long run. The office is more versatile to do business with any project team no matter what software they use. If you ask me, standardize your Revit Library as floating families, and forfeit the minor benefits of face-hosted. Never use “hosted” families, because hosted-families are deleted along with the host. You’ll thank me later.
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