Save an In-Place Family as an RFA for use in another project

Do you have some awesome in-place families that you would like to convert to normal Component families, so that you can load them into other projects?

Here’s how:

Open the Project containing the In-Place family
Edit the In-Place family
Select all of the elements in the family
Group all of these elements using the Create Group tool. Give the Group a name.
Select the Group
Do not Finish Editing the In-Place family yet!
Go to the ‘R’ button (Application Menu) – Save As – Library – Group
You will notice that the filetype is RFA!
Save the Group somewhere.
You Component Family IS the file that you just saved.

I’m sure there are limitation to this method, but I think it is very cool.

Here is a quick video:

Credit for this tip – KarelCAD support document

Discussion

9 archived comments. New comments are not enabled.

Anonymous 2011-07-31 23:00:43

@LEEDing_Lady Adrianna Schneider
Fantastic! From What #Revit Wants: bit.ly/plr2Q9
21 hours ago via web
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revit.king 2011-08-01 15:17:54

As always - very useful informative post! I will mention in my quick testing (read: playing) with this, it seems one limitation would be the voids. I lost the action of the voids cutting the modeled entity. The voids are still there, but I did have to go back onto my new family (yeah!) and cut the voids again, no problem. This may not be the case for everyone, but I just thought I would mention it.

Anway, thanks Luke - keep up the awesome work!

Anonymous 2012-05-09 16:30:05

Thanks, However when I attempt this in Revit 2012 I do not get the option to save as an .rfa file, only .rvt. I thought this was because I had included walls but this was also true when I tried saving a group of components only. What step did I miss?

Luke Johnson 2012-05-09 23:11:50

You have to still be 'inside' (editing) the in-place family...

Anonymous 2012-08-17 15:30:09

Great way to break down a larger model into reuseable groups for a library or future projects. Having several .rfa files will be helpful. Thanks.

Anonymous 2013-02-06 15:14:11

Autodesk should add as a feature to convert In-place components to stand alone external components.

Anonymous 2015-05-11 17:18:00

I have the same issue mentioned above where Revit tries to save all families rather than the individual in-place component. Has anyone found a reason for this or a workaround?

Unknown 2015-10-15 10:55:16

Great post! What i needed to change was the elevations within the family. I clipped an item from the 8th floor in a building and pasted it in the 6th of another, to find it back on the 14th floor... Changing the elevation of the objects to 0.00 fixed this problem.