Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Follow Up Post - Family Puzzler

I recorded a quick video to demonstrate how I constrained a nested beam family using the Reference and Shape Handle elements of the beam as well as how it breaks when I use the Family Type data type feature to change beam sizes.



Chris Price at Revit Rants just happened to post a video tonight about his effort to constrain nested columns. Related issue and I suspect that if he tried to make the column type swappable with the Family Type data type that it would compete with his technique to solve the problem. Overall I would like to avoid editing the stock content to "make-it-work".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the video. So you basically constrained the start location pt, the start shape handle and the end shape handle, but not the end location pt. What I was trying to do was constrain the start location pt and the end location pt. If you do that it will fail, and actually my hunch is that your issue and mine are related. In that it has to do with how the structural framing family is built where the start and end extension are built around the center of the family. Just a hunch though

Chris said...

Hi Steve,

I can confirm that making the column type swappable with my workaround doesn't compete with my solution. However, it does require user input to define the instance parameter that says whether the column is nested or not. Basically there are two frameworks built on top of each other. So if its not nested it works as it always has...