How to Use Shared Nested Families in Revit Projects - BIMsmith Revit Tutorial
This BIMsmith Revit Tutorial will help you understand shared nested Revit families and how to use them. Learn more about BIMsmith at https://market.bimsmith.com.
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Hi, this is Ethan with BIMsmith. Today's video is going to be looking at shared nested families and how they can help save time and make workflows a little bit simpler and easier when you're using families that are almost always put together or assembled together. So in this case, we're going to look at assembling a water closet along with all the other necessary parts of that into a single-family then load it up into our project so the advantage here of using a shared nested family is that the shared nested family schedules as if it was placed just as is within the project from the get-go so for the purposes of this example we're going to have a grab bar we're going to have a toilet paper dispenser we're going to have a sanitary napkin receptacle, we're going to have the water closet itself and those are all going to go into a single-family.
The advantage here is that that family can be mirrored or flipped around rotated things like that into whatever kind of configuration we need with all these things staying in the same relationship to one another so in order to kind of get started we're just going to go ahead and share all the families so the shared parameter is over here in the properties panel and each one of these families is going to have it so we're going to go ahead and share all of them because we want them to schedule in the project once we get there and then once that's done I’m going to go ahead and drag my project back or my family back in.
So I’m just going to go ahead and say that the requirements for that toilet paper dispenser is at seven to nine inches off the nose of the toilet according to ADA, so we're going to go ahead and make that nine inches which put us into the right ballpark for both. Make sure I get that locked because we want to keep that in place. Then the sanitary napkin is typically a little bit behind that um looking at something here that just says line it up with the noise of the toilet so we're going to go ahead and do that too, and then in terms of elevation I think it's a minimum of 18 inches to the bottom of that I’m not getting a great reference plane here to place that to so we're just going to kind of pick one, and then we'll drop that down to 18 inches. The same thing with the napkin um I want to just make sure that's the right reference plane um and then we can drop him down.
Alright, so that was a pretty quick introduction to the idea of shared nested families and what they can be used for obviously, this is just sort of one use case.
Another use case would be putting doors and door hardware in the same family so that way you can sort of switch things out. Another really powerful tool here is that if you use a couple different kinds of products, you could apply a parameter that would allow you to change the nested families out but that's probably a topic we'll tackle in a subsequent video. Thanks for watching.