Revit Family RFA Certification

Revit Market puts all Revit families published in the Building Components media type through a certification process. The process is manual, meaning a Revit professional goes through all the steps with each family to determine whether it is up to our standards.

Our standards are designed to check whether a family will work as expected. In other words, when a user purchases and downloads a family, it should work exactly as expected without further modifications.

Revit families that pass certification are marked as Certified in the product preview. Families that don't pass the test still remain in our catalog, but are not marked as certified.

There are Revit families available for download in a variety of places on the Internet. But content that you get for free in places other than Autodesk Seek are not guaranteed to work correctly. You might spend time downloading families only to find they don't work, and you have to make them all from scratch anyway.

To give our customers confidence in their purchases, all Revit families in the Building Components catalog are subjected to the certification process.

These are the basic steps used to test a Revit family for certification.

1. Inspect all views at all detail levels (Coarse, Medium, Fine) to ensure any text is readable at the appropriate scale, and that representations are clean and appropriately represent the family.
   
2. Make sure the family looks appropriate in all graphics styles (wireframe, hidden line, shading, shading with edges).
   
3. Flex the family and look for anomalies.
   
4. Create new types and modify parameters to make sure they work correctly.
   
5. Verify that any material assignments are associated correctly.
   
6. For hosted families, test the hosting.
   
7. For 3D families, test the rendering.
   
8. Test copy/paste, rotate, and mirror to ensure they work correctly.
   

When a family passes certification, it is marked as such, and the Revit Certified Family icon appears at the upper right of the product's full preview.

When a family is rejected, no notification appears. The seller is notified of the rejection reason only if the seller requests to know this. To ask about your product's certification status, or to request reasons for rejection, please open a support ticket.

Certification is a manual process, and naturally, there are gray areas when testing families. If a family has a few small, easily correctable problems, it will still pass certification.

A family with the following errors will still pass certification:

Wrong category. We will correct the category with no further comment.

Price too high. We recommend pricing based on our Pricing Guidelines, which are based on user surveys. A family priced higher than our guidelines recommend will still pass certification. We might, at our discretion, contact the seller with a suggestion for a more appropriate price.

Poor or missing description. Items with full, informative descriptions sell better than those with brief or blank descriptions. Still, lack of a description is not grounds for refusing certification.

Unusual parameter names. It is expected that family creators will use sensible parameter names like Height, Width, and Depth. However, there are no set standards for parameter names, so we can't enforce them. When a standard becomes available, we will add "correct parameter names" to our certification process.

Inaccurate BIM information. It would be impossible for our certification team to keep up with all BIM information for all types of families. In addition, the information changes regularly, as prices rise and fall, or different materials become available. Ultimately, it's up to the purchaser/user to make sure the BIM information associated with the family suits his/her project.

If you have any questions about certification or Revit Market, feel free to contact me at mbousquet@turbosquid.com.

To search for Revit families and models, or to publish files for sale, go to Revit Market.

Read about the Beta program

Return to Revit home page