Hey Swooll3: I too am having issues with creating 'smart' panels, I work at an industrial steel company, we make our own panels, with our unique profile. I was wondering if you had any personal responses from the Forum? I can't seem to find any resources for the higher end looking panel manipulation within Revit. I may escalate all the way up to Autodesk themselves.

Welcome to Revitforum.

Please provide more information about this 'panel'. What kind of panel? What category is it? What is the specific problem about it?

Hi Alfredo, thanks for reaching out -I've attached a screenshot of my test metal panel family, they are 16" wide as standard, but we often cut these down as we often need to fabricate a make up piece to fill an irregular size, but they still have the folded ends to allow the guys to fasten to each other. We design and fabricate these on the same site, which is great for the design team. Before this family - which did not have the angle at the top - we had to create a void and then stretch the panel beyond - but I didn't like this because we couldn't schedule heights of each panel. The wish list goes as follows...

- adjustable width
- adjustable angle
- adjustable height that when setting the highest point - will also give you the new value of the lowest point based on angle and other height. (If that makes sense)
- It would be great If I could have a 'node' (or whatever it is called) to grab, and pull the height of the panel to match the one next to it. but I can't remember how to do build this in to the family! I swear I am losing it in my old age!

The reason why all these parameters are so valuable to me and the team, is that we would like to be able to auto populate all this measurements directly from Revit and in the future - push the data out to our plasma. I would REALLY appreciate anyone's help.

Happy holidays everyone.

check out the attached family that I use for segmented roof copings. It should give you some ideas of how to solve your issues. My family has parametric height, width, length, and separate angles at each end and has parametric joints between each coping section. If I needed a vertical panel family as you have posted I would just alter this family to suit your condition. The attached family is R2016 as that is as far back as I go these days.

Dave Jones ~ Thank you so much for taking the time to look at this. I am new to writing up on this forum. Apologies - I hit 'tab' and have learnt that, tab posts your draft immediately. Then I couldn't find out how to edit, but I've figured that out now too. You'll notice a better write up now. Your voids in the family are what I used too, this is great because you can still set dimensions up to this void, giving the 'cut' dimension. Unlike when you are in a project, when you do the same, it will still pump out the overall dimension of the panel that you have dragged in to the void space. we are going to use this family for 90 deg cuts also, but being able to schedule overall lengths of each panel will be just dreamy in comparison to manual layouts. Thanks again for taking the time.

Just a quick note - if anyone is reading this and finding it useful. Please donate to the site. All this information is FREE, and consultants would usually charge a LOT for all this great info. Even just a buck from a few people will add up. It takes 2 minutes to donate. AND you get a really nice email of thanks from the moderators Just my thoughts...

I schedule coping net lengths (ObjectLength) via the family I posted in projects all of the time. No issues. Check out the object_clear1 and void_clear1 parameters to see how they work to obtain ObjectLength. The scheduled length is available regardless of the end angles. 90º is square end cut and you can go down to around 20º end cut before the family gets funky. I've never had a plan segment requiring anything close to that tight of an angle. Looking at your panel screen shot I don't think that you would ever need an angle sharper than 20º either.