Family Editor Interface

Update: Family Editor Interface was added to the Featured App category! 

On 30 May 2016, Archilizer’s first plugin got a place in the featured apps in the Revit Store. We are really happy with this fact and we hope that now the plugin will have the chance to reach and help even more people out there!

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This is a special one for me because this is our first officially published Archilizer Plug-in! I am incredibly excited about the launch of this first digital toddler and I wish it all the luck and happy moments with its new users!

In this Plugin Review, I will go into detail of what the plugin does and where to download it from but first, let me give you a few words about the process of submitting a plugin to the Autodesk Plugin Store, as this might be interesting to the few of you who are thinking of sharing their programmatic work with the world. Having been through the process once, I would dare to say that it might be easier the next time around, however for a first timer, the venture sure was intimidating. In a sense, writing the plugin itself was the easier part, as following the admittedly many Autodesk sources was actually a challenge.

Your first action, after creating an account in the App Store website, is to go to the following link, read through the text and head to the bottom of the page, where you will see a little matrix with video tutorials. Watch those at least a few times. No go back and read the text again. Once you’ve gained enough courage, start the procedure of launching a new plugin and refer to the above resources as you need. Every single bit of the process can take a lot of resources. Personally, I would recommend outsourcing the logo design, because even for a seasoned graphics pseudo-designer as myself, I ended up producing a crappy logo with an even crappier resolution, for some yet unknown reason (this will be the first thing that I will be updating as well).

Challenging as it may be, don’t worry all that much. After putting everything down the way it is described, publish your work and you will have the pleasure to communicate with the IT Support team which will guide you through the rest of the process. It literally feels like a humanized bug removal tool. On every step of the way, they will report when they encounter a hurdle or an obstacle and make you fix it. From start to finish, the whole thing took about a month. I hope this gives you a feeling of what it’s like to publish a plugin to the Autodesk Store. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions. Now let’s get back to this plugin and see why it is so adorable!

What it does.

Family Editor Interface takes only those parameters which manipulation is useful in creating an intuitive feedback on how your family is behaving and slaps them onto a simple applet that sits quietly in your work field. The simple sliders represent the values of those parameters. They give you a meaningful range of values to play with and test the mechanics of your door, window or furniture system. The plugin is conceptualized as an interactive tool that makes the process of family creation more enjoyable. The plugin is most certainly influenced by Grasshopper, Dynamo and the like and is one of those quality-of-life add-ins which you could do without but just makes your task more pleasant.

Who is it for.

Anyone who spends enough time in the Family Editor. In my practice, enough time is the time necessary for you to create a responsive, well-parametrized family which does not break in contact with regular users. A complex family has a lot of interconnected relationships between its parameters and even for its creator it is sometimes hard to intuit the internal logic of the structure. That’s when this simple interface comes really handy, as it allows you to quickly test the functionality of all your ‘important’ parameters, or in other words, the parameters which drive the family. However, once used to this extra panel, it becomes a second nature to just check your parameters and I tend to use it even for small components with just a Width and a Height parameter.

Is it free?

It is absolutely free and if there is enough interest from the community, I will open the source on GitHub, so folks can play with it and take it in the direction they want. Meanwhile, I will be taking on board any comments and suggestion in order to make the tool as user-friendly and useful as possible.

How to use:

You can find a few short video tutorials on how this plugin is used on the publisher’s website. I would like to think that the tool is quite easy to understand and use, but if you have any suggestions, please write me in the comments section below or by contacting us.

Tips and Tricks:

Use the ‘Refresh Document’ button to quickly ‘reset’ the defaults of your parameters and incrementally reach a higher/lower value.

Try it now! Test it for free! 

You can find the Family Editor Interface in the Revit section of the official Revit Plugins Store here:

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