Karambaki’s amazing Revit KCONVERT Family – convert Families into Face Based and more.

If you’re reading this then the title of this post has perhaps grabbed your attention and after reading it, you might be very glad it did!

A young Revit genius called Karam Baki recently posted about a Revit Family that he created that allows you to take any family and change its hosting behaviour to another type.

If you’ve ever created Families or even downloaded Families in the hope of using them in a project you will inevitably come across an issue where a family was created to interact with its host in some way (wall based, ceiling based as so forth) and you need it to interact with the host in another way (though in this Karam is assuming you’ll want to convert your Family to face-based). If you have been there, you know that it can effectively mean re-making the Family pretty much over again and depending on its complexity and the amount of formulas and parameters, this can take some time.

So enter “Karambaki’s amazing  Revit KCONVERT” Family which is a Revit Family (RFA) that allows you to insert the “misbehaving” Family into it and then load this new Family into a suitable Family template to transform it. Karam hs created a very good video that explains all of the necessary steps and it is 30 minutes well spent to watch it.

To cover it briefly though, this is a 3 step process:

1. Firstly you’ll need to do some adjustments to your Family in order to set it up for reuse in the KCONVERT Family. You then need move the internal origin to the inserted family once you’ve added it to the correct type of host that matches the type of host of the original Family. You will now need to map the parameters of the inserted Family by making matching paramters in the KCONVERT Family.
2. Open a Family template that matches the new type of host that you want to convert the Family to. For example, you might have a Wall based Family so you load it into the KCONVERT Family and then open a suitable Family Template and load the KCONVERT into that. You will now need to repeat the step of mapping the parameters again. You may also need to add host cutting and a new light so there is a bit of setting up to do. The great thing is that you don’t have to set up the model elements again and the parameters all come in

The process can still take a while but it is very powerful as it can transform any Family into a face-based Family. Below is an example of a before and after shot of a normal Wall hosted Window Family that has been converted into a face based Family.

Lastly here is the link to the Autodesk Help article written by Karam Baki – Karam’s post

Have fun!