Creating a Project Template is a fairly well documented feature of Revit. You create a new Project Template by selecting the New Project Template option, put all the walls, floors, text-styles, etc in there that you will need for a new project and save.

But what about a Revit Family Template?

No word about that in the documentation - at least not that I could find. But after some online-searching and a few tryouts I found that it is indeed possible. And quite simple, too.

The quick summary:

• create a new family using the established templates that come with Revit
• put the stuff in that you need
• save as a family
• change the ending from .rfa to .rft

That's it.

But why, you ask? Could I not just create a regular family with the content that I'll need, edit it to fit my current project and then save as a new family?

Yes, you could do that. Problem is the save as part. If you are anything like me, [ctrl] + [s] is very much ingrained into your working habit. And I for one would propably ruin this perfectly good family by the second time I edit it.

Plus, it's neater this way. :)

Before buying Revit for our company about 8 months back now (still 2009), I was browsing through the forums and found the persitant oppinion, that Revit will only render in single-core mode, even if you have a multicore-machine. And even after going to 2010, that oppinion was widespread.

Since we are using Artlantis for our render work, I didn't care much.

But today I wanted a quick render and didn't feel like importing the model into Artlantis, so I figured I'd try Revit directly. And, lo and behold, Revit actually used both cores I have in my machine.

I have since then looked around further and it seems that Revit will utilize up to 4 cores for rendering.

So for quicke scenes I think I'll start using the Mental Ray engine in the future. Good to know.

When creating Elevations in Revit, you need to pay attention to the rotation of your view. If you are not perfectly perpendicular to the Grids, they will not be displayed in your view.

Luckily, Revit knows this and adjusts the rotation accordingly:





Pretty cool, I thought.