Family Templates and View Orientation

An exchange of posts at Revitforum.org with Alfredo regarding family templates prompts this post. The thread began with a question about orientation. I've written about this in the past. I was confused by the use of Exterior/Interior labels then.

I find a fair number of new Revit family editors seem to start out with door families. If that's your first foray into content you might starting thinking the top of the view is "front". It's labeled Exterior. I tend to think of the exterior side of a door panel as the front side when making one. This tripped me up for awhile. I wrote the post thinking the other templates were wrong when compared with the door template, at the very least different. Technically they are all the same, front is at the bottom of the page.

I recently examined every imperial family template (release 2014) that is used for 3D geometry. They all respect the notion of orientation where the bottom of the view is front, the top of the view is back, the right side is ride and left is left. Some templates have labels like Exterior/Interior and Placement Side. In the thread at RFO Alfredo noted that the Generic Model Adaptive template does not respect this orientation. In my view it does but when the template was created the front and back views were named incorrectly. The front view is really the back. If we examine geometry using the view cube we'll find every family will show the geometry the same way when we manipulate the cube.

He also mentioned the Profile Mullion template. They've provided labels to help orient yourself when you sketch your profile. In this image you can see that I've created a bullet shaped mullion profile and applied it to a curtain wall. The bullet ends up on the exterior side.

What is curious is that if the profile is not symmetrical the result is a mirrored condition when applied to the mullion in the project. That's a little unexpected.

If, in an elevation view, I place a detail section that looks up the profile matches what I see in the mullion family.

So we have to twist our perspective around a bit to get a sense of orientation. The short story is that mullion profile is a mirror of what we see in plan with respect to right/left orientation. Exterior and interior are displayed as the labels imply.

Definitely quirky...

In-Place Massing and Project Orientation Inequity

In-Place families are necessary for some geometry, in particular the massing environment. I've always stressed that people should start a project without being concerned about site alignment immediately. Revit was (is) designed to allow us to adjust True North easily after the fact. As I've written before, just make it easy to "draw on paper".

A recent post at RevitForum.org underscores that bias when it asked if the two project orientation tools seem to work differently? Actually it was just focused on Rotate Project North (RPN) and that in-place massing didn't play along when it was applied. Rotate True North (RTN) on the other hand does work.

In this image the massing has been created aligned with the "site" but we've realized that it would be easier to document if Project North were aligned along one building edge.

In this image I've used the Rotate Project North and picked the reference plane I sketched to mark the East/West bearing I wanted. I had to rotate the text but the tool rotated the reference plane correctly but the massing is unchanged.

As I wrote in my reply there, RTN is sleight of hand while RPN is really altering the entire model and related views to change orientation. In other words RTN rotates the world under the building and RPN rotates the building on the world. Rotating the world is actually "easier" (less work) for Revit than grabbing every element and everything in every view and rotating it (the building).

If you heed my Two Pieces of Advice, you'll start a project off better...