A Revit Family is a small 3d Model used by architects to represent some component of a building. A Family could be built to represent literally anything: sinks, toilets, light fixtures, furniture, cabinets, etc. A fully developed Revit model is effectively just a collection of hundreds of these families assembled to represent a building before it’s constructed. What makes these “Families” so powerful is that each 3D model has a matching 2D symbol.

In practice, that means when you place a family in a project, you can instantly see it in both floorplans and renderings. This feature is what enables Revit to be such an efficient and powerful program. 

SD stands for "Schematic Design". The other important phases of a design are "Design Development" (DD) and "Construction Documentation" (CD). 

Typically, Schematic Design is the first phase of a new project where initial ideas are presented and developed. It is characterized by lots of quick testing and exploration of different design directions. My Revit families are built from scratch to help Architects iterate quickly in this phase.

That said, when loaded with the proper specifications and keynotes for your office, all my families can be used through DD (Design Development) and CDs (Construction Documentation) as well. To be efficient, I always try to avoid swapping out families in DD and CD.

Oddly enough, I was inspired to develop these by the way that another BIM program, ArchiCAD, handles 3d Objects. Although I strongly dislike the ArchiCAD documentation tools (relative to Revit), I did like how easy it was to develop a design in SD as you can effectively manipulate all your objects on the fly without digging through menus. Generally speaking, the built-in ArchiCAD objects were reliable, offered all the basic parameters a residential designer needs, and had consistent graphic aesthetics. That’s virtually the opposite of my experience with Revit families. I figured that the best investment for my workflow would be to build a whole Revit library that functions similarly to those ArchiCAD families. I can now design as fluidly as I did in ArchiCAD while still leveraging the powerful documentation tools that Revit offers. It was one of the best investments in my workflow that I could have made. 

Having acted as an accredited BIM Manager for a firm of 20+ people, I have firsthand experience organizing and developing Revit families in a live office environment. If I released a new family to the firm that wasn’t properly vetted, it would propagate silently into dozens of projects before the errors were caught. Like a virus, that initial version of the rogue family would be difficult to completely remove.

The SD Toolkit forms the foundation of my personal Revit library is the accumulation of lessons learned from these, occasionally painful, moments.

I take a lot of pride in releasing families that simply work.

All of the families in the SD ToolKit are intentionally designed to represent generic version of common building products. During schematic design, I’m rarely concerned with the exact specification or model of any singular item. IE the first time I’m proposing a pocketing glass door system, I’m not concerned yet whether it’s from Western, Fleetwood, or Sky-Frame. Those are discussions for the Design Development phase.

 My families are intended to quickly cover what Architects care about during the early phases of design. We need to account for widths, heights, clearances, etc. in plan views and immediatley have a good looking 3D representation for renderings.

 Generally speaking, I’ve found the Revit families developed from most manufacturers are built to be more of a sales tool than be a useful tool for schematic design; They are overly constrained with parameters we don’t care about or they provide us with 30 different models with minor variations that are difficult to swap out. Neither of these approaches are useful in SD when the goal is rapid iteration.

Families are often free and that is precisely why they are so horrible to work with. There are no quality standards and no incentives for people to make and share better families. By selling my families to you, I am 100% committed to making sure you get the value you are paying for. As a professional, I expect your billable rates to be ~$250-$500 per hour. My full collection is therefore a rough equivalent of a couple hours of your billable time. You could easily waste more time than that scouring the bowels of the internet trying to build your own “free” library from scratch but end up with something a fraction as useful and organized. I’ve spent hundreds of hours building, testing, and organizing these so that you can jump in and start using them immediately without issue.

These were developed in Revit 2020 and will work in all versions of Revit that have been released since. There will be an "upgrade" process the first time they are opened to get them up to the version you are on. Since Revit doesn't offer backwards compatibility, they won't work if you're in Revit 2019 or older.

 Email me asap! I offer a lifetime warranty on the families I sell. If you've purchased any of my collections, you should expect them to work without needing to troubleshoot them yourself. I will personally fix it and send you an updated version.

 

Yes, I actually encourage this. Though if you break any of the parameters I won’t be able to help fix it for you. Just make sure you have a backup of the original. If you need help creating custom families reach out to me directly and we can develop a strategy to reach your goals.  

Yes, shoot me an email and I can provide a discount code for you. 

If you decide to purchase the full collection within 14 days, I have no issue with honoring the full collection discount. Just shoot me an email and we'll I get you a one-time use code for your purchase.

Shoot me an email and I’ll follow up with you personally.