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Creating Your Own Revit Family Template

As you may know, the family templates provided by Autodesk have lots of inconstant settings and due to the fact that Revit uses the unit ‘Inch’ by default, some numbers are odd in the template. One of the most annoying tasks of using the default template is whenever I create a family, I have to purge and audit the settings that are brought from the new family. Of course, there is an add-in called Guardian to prevent importing all those settings, but you have to pay for it.


Therefore, the best solution to this issue is to have a family template has all your standards, then you will have all your settings before starting the content creation and don’t need to clean up your file.


Before starting this process, you need to prepare your company standard file if you already have all the settings. Otherwise, you shall set it up first.


1. Setting up your family template

To start setting up your Revit family template, you need to open Revit and Create a New family. Then it will lead you to the location where the default family templates are saved (if you cannot find it, then you need to download it from Autodesk. It is normally installed when Revit is installed).


open revit family template

Select the generic model template (you can choose any template to start with) and open it. There are just three tasks that you need to do.

☑ Delete default settings including materials (Manage Tap)


audit family template

☑ Re-name the Views and View type family (Project Browser)


re-name views

☑ Amend the dimension styles, filled regions, and text types. (Annotation Tap)


amend dimension style filled region text

After the tasks, you can transfer the standards from your company template. That’s it. You have just made a family which includes all your settings, so save it as a family (.rfa)

2. Change the file extension

Go to the location where you have saved the file. Right-click or Press F2 to rename the file (make sure your extension is visible). Change its extension from .rfa to .rft.


change the file extension

Go back to Revit and see whether the template appears.

3. Duplicate the templates

Once it is done, you need to do the same process for other templates as some model categories are specific such as wall-hosted, baluster, and so on. After all your work, then you have the master family templates to cover all the model categories in Revit. When you create casework, you can still use the Generic Model template as you can easily change the model category in the family editor.


family category

There are a few templates needed to create all family types in Revit, so you don’t need to have all the family templates for all model categories.

4. Essential Family Templates


Essential family template

To Sum up

Now you have your own Revit family template and don’t need to worry about the junkies imported to your project. It is recommended to purge the family before saving it since the custom template is quite heavy and pre-load all the shared parameters that your company would normally use. If you tempt to create a better BIM environment or system, we are always here to assist you at best.

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