Making custom family template with pre-baked geometry

Autodesk offers out-of-the-box a lot of Revit family templates: “Generic Model”, “Generic Model Face Based”, “… Wall Based”, “…Ceiling Based”, …

A lot of companies wants to add some specific characteristic (property, watermark, text, …) to all of their families. Therefore it is very useful having this already pre-baked in your Revit family, right? “Well, that one is easy. Just make a basic family based on the right OOTB template, save it and make a copy of it for each new family you need to base on that.” It’s simple and straight forward; yes, it could work.

But what if I don’t want this specific element to be deleted from the family based on the custom template? For example, you don’t want the watermark, which is created by an invisible geometry, to be deleted? Here it is:

1. Make a new family based on a OOTB Revit family template.
2. Create the necessary general parameters you need
3. Add some geometry that acts as your watermark
4. Select the geometry and uncheck the “Visible” parameter
5. Save the family (i.e. MyTemplate.rfa)
6. Open Windows Explorer on the folder where “MyTemplate.rfa” is saved
7. Make sure that the file extensions are switched on in Windows Explorer
8. Change the file extension of MyTemplate to “.rft” instead of “.rfa”
9. When you create a new family based on the “MyTemplate.rft” template, you will notice that this will create a new file (i.e. Family1) and the pre-baked geometry can’t be deleted.
10. Unfortunately, the custom parameters CAN be deleted.

Have fun !