I hear it all the time from my colleagues how they can’t make money out of designing in 3D using BIM.

I tell them it is all about having a great families.

Naturally they all say we have developed our own families over the years and what we don’t have we get from the net. Maybe that is the problem. You can bet a lot of the time the family is a legacy family carried forward from a similar project.

The problem with legacy families is the same as for legacy templates.  Often they are a means to an end – being get the job to a stage where you can get some money.

When I started on my transition to Revit I found one of the most difficult tasks was to finding families that would communicate exactly to the client what I had in mind.

There are a lot of free families available but many are just someone else’s legacy family with the inherent issues of being hastily and poorly created.

Have you ever logged just how much time is spent on trawling the net looking for one single family? Don’t do it or you really don’t want to know – or maybe you should?

This is where having a great library of families comes in to its own. Rather than spending hundreds of hours or dollars trying to find, or worse, create your own families, a good library will have that already done for you. Even if it is not perfect the best thing about a good family is you can investigate how it was created. This allows you to reverse engineer any minor changes if you require any.  Even better a great family will have lots of parameters which makes instances very easy to create.

This is of course the whole point – you should never have to waste time creating families.

Good families save you lots of time and make you look switched on to the client.

As important as good families, is a simple way to access them.

Eventually you will work out what you want:

1. an easily accessible family and system families library
2. to deliver good design and documents for your clients
3. to make some money

You may also work out what you do not want:

1. to spend forever looking for good families on line
2. to have to register and download and save the families in a way everyone can find them again
3. to know exactly how to build complex parametric families
4. to spend time assigning materials to the families or having to assemble them into components

You also need to start producing good drawings straight away so you will also need a QARC Template. But that is the subject of another Blog.

QARC Systems was created by a handful of skilled and experienced designers and Revit experts who felt it was about time there was collaboration in the industry. This group of designers and software gurus decided they could assist in helping the design profession earn a living. So QARC Systems created QARC4Revit, a world first plug-in that gives a design practice all the tools they need.

By saving designers from having to reinvent the wheel QARC can shave 2-4 years off your Revit learning curve – so you can master Revit faster.

For more information on the Free QARC4Revit plug-in or to upgrade to the subscription Professional or Premium versions of QARC4Revit go to www.qarcsystems.com.au

Don’t have Revit yet? Contact CADGROUP for all your BIM solutions and services and get the ultimate bundle of Revit with QARC4Revit go to www.cadgroup.com.au