Revit Architecture: Creating Your Own Mullions
The Curtain Wall tools in Revit are fantastic. Once you get used to them, you’ll find yourself using Curtain Walls for far more than just the obvious. A major component of Curtain Walls are the Mullions. The default Autodesk Revit Template comes with a small selection of Mullions.
image © BIMscape
This selection is OK to get you started. But at some point you’re are probably going to want to create your own Mullions, based on a sectional profile that you define. In this short tutorial, I am going to show you just how to do that.
Revit Mullions are defined by the “Mullion Type”, which in turn are defined by (along with other parameters) the Mullion Profile. In order to create our own Mullion, we first need to create a new Mullion Profile. We do that in the Family Editor, using the Mullion Profile family template. I’m going to go ahead and create a new Mullion Profile Family……
image © BIMscape
As stated above, it is crucial that you use the correct Family Template for the job- in this case, we need to use the Mullion Profile Family template…
image © BIMscape
Upon selecting this, we are thrown straight into the Family Editor Environment within Revit. In the centre of the Drawing Area, you will see a couple of Reference Planes making up a cross-hair. This represents the centre of your Mullion (in plan) when it is used in a Curtain Wall System.
image © BIMscape
You will notice that there are also a few text notes to confirm which side is the Interior and which is the Exterior or the Curtain Wall, so that you can make sure you draw your Profile the correct way round. So let’s go ahead our sketch out our Profile for our new Mullion. Just chose the Line tool on the Ribbon bar…
image © BIMscape
I’m now going to go ahead and sketch out a profile. I’m going to keep this relatively simple for the sake of this tutorial. Of course, you could define parameters and then use Labels to dynamically adjust the profile of the Mullion by changing the parameter values. So here is my Profile….
image © BIMscape
I now need to load this into my Project. Please Note: If you doing this for real, you will probably save these Profile Families in their own folder, for later resuse / re-working. Use the “Load into Project” button to get this Profile into your current Project
image © BIMscape
We now need to create a new Mullion Type, into which we can specify our new Mullion Profile. Go ahead and select Mullion from the Architecture / Build Ribbon Panel….
image © BIMscape
As soon as you select this, the Properties Palette will change to show you the choice of Mullions in your Project. Because we are creating our own Mullion Type, we need to “Edit Type”…..
image © BIMscape
And then “Duplicate” the Type to create our own new Mullion Type….
image © BIMscape
I’m going to call my new Mullion Type “BIMscape_MullionType”…..
image © BIMscape
Once we have create our new Mullion Type, we need to associate our new Mullion Profile Family with it. I do this by looking down the list of parameters in the Properties Palette until I see “Profile”.
image © BIMscape
All I need to do now is activate the drop-down list on the right-hand-side and pick the Mullion Profile that I have previously created. Note: If your Mullion Profile does NOT appear in the drop-down list, it’s because you haven;t loaded it into the current Project.
And that’s essentially it! To test your new Mullion, create a section of Curtain Wall, add some Grid Lines and then add the Mullions- making sure to choose your new Mullion Type of course! Here’s a close up of my new Mullion Type in use…
image © BIMscape
Please Note: Think carefully about the complexity of your Mullions. It may neat to model every rebate and gasket position- but remember, Revit (and your Graphics Card) has to create and manage that 3D geometry in a Project Environment.
This article was originally published on BIMscape and has been republished here with permission.
cover image © unsplash
