Product Description

Edited recently for Revit 2009, This is a learning guide to how to create Revit Families. After becoming productive with Revit the first question that arises is "how to create a family?". Through this is a straightforward question many trainers and textbooks steer wide or gives it a close brush. Finally comes a clear concise step by step guide to creating your first Revit Family! The book begins by explaining the concept of Revit Familes. Exploring their Form, Structure and Purpose. We then explore creating Solid 3D Extrusions with Blends and Sweeps used to build the Components and Model 3D Elements. We then explore adding Parameters for both Instance and Type Families thus adding intelligence and versitity to the Family. After Parameters we approach adding Family Types to the Revit Type Selector pull down. This is a quick, painless and easy way to take the first steps in becoming proficient with Revit Family Creation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43362 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-28
• Binding: Paperback
• 122 pages

About the Author
Ken is the CAD / BIM Administrator for Page Southerland Page (a Nationaly ranked AEC firm). He teaches Revit daily among his other responsiblities, thus the book is written in a concise manner to learn how to build your own families. He is a Autodesk Univerisity Instructor and is on the forefront of using Revit in the Real World of Project deadlines and fast schedules. He supports a multi-discipline office and has been using every release of AutoCad since Version 9. Revit has become his favorite!

Customer Reviews

Please read when considering the other reviews
As the writer, I feel a need to address some of the critisms of this book.
I am not a professional writer, through I guess because I published this book it may seem that I was presenting myself as such.

I am a CAD/BIM Administrator and as such I am responsible for teaching and providing training materials. This book came about as an accumulation of notes on creating a Revit Family. This is a subject which most books and instructors breeze past and do not address in enough depth. The book was created as a training manual for my own class and I never expected the populailty in sales that it has generated. In truth other than my class copies I did not expect to sell any copies however it seems to have found its niche.

One of the reasons this is the lowest priced Revit book on the market is I did realize some of its short comings and did not want to charge much so people would feel that they had recieved something of value for the price.

In some defense this was written orginally for 2008. When reviewing some of the harsher comments in the reviews I have redited the book for Revit 2009 and addressed many of their complaints. I have a new version soon to be offered for Revit 2010 which I am more proud of.

There were some stupid things such as refering to screen colors in the first printing of the book even through it was printed in black and white. I had hoped people would be following along with their software open and the color references would have been of assistance. Evidently this bothered some that wanted to nit pick and I apologise for any confusion this may have caused.

This book is intended as a logical understanding of Families and presents orderly training which many others avoid or skip in having a true understanding of Revit Families. It is not great literature. I am by nature a teacher rather than a writer.

For the person that commented he is sorry he wasted his money. Take another look at the knowledge presented. I looked at his other reviews and realize he is a very experienced user and thus was disappointed in a book designed to teach intermediate families.

It is easy to be disappointed with a product if you have higher expectations. I feel this work is an exploration of Revit Families for the beginner and does provide value and knowledge.

Thanks for reading.

Needs an editor
This is apparently a self-published book with rampant layout problems, poor spelling, and frequent grammatical errors. It refers to specific layer colors in illustrations which is a bit confusing since it is printed in black and white. On the plus side it takes a nice step by step approach; which would be great if you could just work out which page the rest of the sentence you were just reading fled to.

Nobody's perfect, but I appreciate the effort
As one of the original Charles River Software/Revit guinea pigs, I have been using this software and admiring the help and tutorials files that come with it, for a few years. So I was not looking for how-to books, But like most people who have to train others, I have my own favorite authors. Paul Aubin is very good, but Paul is very busy training these days. Cyril Verley is a great trainer, but his books needed a little more editing. Having read the entire 810 pages of the Autodesk Revit Families Guide, this book is far more accessible and useful to the employee whose boss just gave them a week to get the model done. There are some glitches but I always encourage staff to use two sources so they can see the different approaches of different authors.So get this book, and Paul Aubin's book. Or use the Help and Tutorials that come with the product. Good lick, oops, nobody's perfect.