Copying & Pasting Objects between families and projects

Have you ever wanted to copy and paste objects between families and projects? Yongmoo Hur BIM manager for our Hong Kong explains more…..

Assume that you started working in a project and need to model roof/exterior skin on the walls below using ‘Conceptual Mass’.

You may want to bring the walls into the Conceptual Mass, but you cannot do it in current version of Revit. Basically Revit does not allow us to copy objects between projects and families with some exceptions with lines. Most importantly, you can NOT copy anything directly onto ‘conceptual mass family’. You will get error messages below.

True - You can’t copy between families and projects. But you CAN copy between families. We can use this.

1. Click ‘In-Place Mass’ to start ‘In-place Mass family’

2. Using ‘Reference or Model line’ + ‘Pick Lines’, Trace profiles.

3. Before you ‘Finish Mass’, Pick the lines and paste it onto ‘Conceptual mass’. Because you are inside of an in-place family, you will be able to copy lines to Conceptual family template.

Now you can model objects in the Conceptual Mass family!

You can also model a mass, and you will be able to copy and paste the mass within edit mode (again, BEFORE you ‘Finish Mass’)

For those who are more interested, below are further findings about behaviour on that subject

• You can NOT copy and paste walls directly into any family templates.
• Linking Revit will NOT work. The ‘Link Revit’ button becomes greyed out.
• You can NOT copy model lines to the ‘Conceptual mass family’ template.
• You CAN copy model lines to regular family templates. Trace profile using model lines and copy and paste onto family templates- generic model, for instance. And you CAN load this regular family into Conceptual Mass Family. It would be great if we can get rid of this extra step though.
• You CAN copy detail lines to Profile family templates. -- Trace profile using detail lines and copy and paste onto the ‘Profile family template’. But you can NOT load this into ‘Conceptual Mass’