Good morning all! Below you will find a list of websites, which offer external solutions for Revit. All of these I have tried out myself and would recommend. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the sites change or new ones are created. If there are any other programs/websites which you would advise, then drop me a line, and I will add it to the list. This list was compiled mainly from the All things BIM blog.

Hey guys! So, I have been playing around in Revit over the last few days, making a design for a friend who wanted a 3D commemorative plaque with the Manchester United logo on it. Now I am fully aware this is not what Revit was designed to do and I'm sure there are other programs which could do the job more efficiently, but as I love doing basically everything in Revit, I thought I'd give it a go and see how the results turned out!

Today, I will be showing you how to create simple parametric families in Revit. This tutorial is for anyone learning Revit who hasn't yet got into creating families. I will be continuing to post more family tutorials so keep checking back over the coming weeks for more. This tutorial will show you how to create a simple 'cube family' with a fixed elevation height with parametric width and height as well as material options. 

Today I will be posting the 2nd part in my Revit family creation series. I started last week with the very basics of parametric family creation, and will be going more in depth over the coming weeks, starting with part 2 today; Creating a simple table in Revit Architecture 2013. I have avoided repeating the basics that I covered in part 1, so if there is anything that you are not clear about, watch part 1 now.

Part Three of my Revit architecture family series will be about creating simple parametric windows. If you missed the First part or the Second part, follow the links to bring you up to date. These tutorials are starting from the very basics of family creation all the way up to detailed advanced families. If you are having problems with windows or new to window familes, use the tutorial below as a guide.

This blog has been translated into English from a French post on the Revitez blog I saw a translation request from Lukey Johnson on Linkedin. Although I've forgotten most of the French I once learnt many years ago in school, with a little help from Google translate it goes something like this (I hope!):

Autodesk have created a Revit model style guide. In this guide are various guidelines to follow via documents which can help you to develop and quality assure your Revit models. The following information was taken from the Autodesk Seek website. I have been roughly following this guide while developing my Revit families for a while now, and just wanted to share this information with anyone who may be looking for some direction.

When designing Revit families, you have to always keep in mind the level of detail you are putting in to your families, and the affect this will have on the performance of your project. When you have a large project with numerous families you may notice that your Revit starts to run slower, even when you are doing tasks unrelated to the detail of the project e.g. printing. One of the reasons for Revit "under-performing" could be the visibility settings setup or level of detail of families in a project.

Paul Aubin has recently released a video showing his progress with his Corinthian columns that he is trying to model as a fully parametric Revit family. The video to the right shows the process of him modeling the decorative leaves on the column, and the methods he has used modeling to achieve such an abstract form.

When creating large Revit families which have a number of types / variations (e.g. size) of the same model, it may be useful to create a 'type catalog' to accompany the family in your project. In short, a type catalogue will reduce the amount of data going into your model when you import a new component / family. Rather than loading all 6+ types of the same family into the project, it will allow you to pick from a list (your type catalog) which size or modification of your family that you need loaded in this particular instance. This is particularly useful in families where you have 6 or more different types which could significantly slow your project down.