Wednesday, October 7, 2015

House Competitions and Swimming Pools

Bit busy here in Misty Lakes (we have a cat called Misty and a pond out the back of the section).

In a fit of something I decided to enter an Architectural Competition. The brief (which hopefully will stay up for a while) is at http://www.designabeautifulhouse.com/brief.html

Drawn in Revit because I like torturing myself.  Made it a round house for the same reason.







Then I had an actual paying job fiddling around with a glass swimming pool railing.  

This I did in Autocad and as a free extra I investigated the idea of doing a rendering of it.
Autocad: looked awful.  3DStudio Max: Could not seem to separate out stuff to get materials to latch onto.  So I made an FBX file of it and whipped it into Revit.  Success! Well, not huge quality, but not too bad. Really pleased with how the pool water actually looked something like it should.







Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Revit Rendering

Just gone into panic mode, trying desperately to get a good interior render from ANY software.
Preferably one I have paid for!

I did a try using Twinmotion, looking in vain for the right settings to improve the quality and finding none.  It is fast though.  Here is a sample done using Twinmotion:


  After much fluffing around, I have come to this conclusion:

1. Revit does not seem to be good at exterior renders.  This could be me not knowing the right buttons to push, though.

2. Revit is the one to use for interior renders.  Yup, even if you have 3D Studio Max!
Here is the evidence, again, is it that Revit has less buttons to press, so I have less chance of stuffing it up?

This is the Revit one:


This is the 3Dstudio Max one.


In the process of setting up the model, I trolled the net in vain for a "fancy" coffee table as shown in one of the customer's photos.
So I made my own one in Autocad and slung it into Revit.  Oh joy: it works well!
Another 5 minutes to make a bowl in Autocad, then a picture for the wall.  The little mirrored cabinet also modeled in Autocad and materials were applied to it.

Then I thought to download a trial copy of Corel Photopaint, which lasts for 30 days.

Unlike Paint.net, I found I could leap into a photo of some cushions, cut them out and stick them in the rendered image fairly easily. I had a copy of Photopaint years ago and found things had not changed much.  I do like the 2015 one and if I get more work might buy it.

Then I had a rush of blood to the head (must be Wed morning badminton!), and thought: Have I tried dear old Autocad for a render of the Revit model?

My first thought was to import an FBX model.  This is ok, but no materials showing.  Then an export from Revit to a dwg file.

This was better, but all the material names got renamed to numbers in the process, and were not applied to the right items.

Anyway, hours later I ran out of patience with it. I can see that it might be a possibility if you had enough patience.  A bit weird as some glass came through from Revit. Note: the tiles on the underside of the roof!


Here is the Autocad pic:


Saturday, September 5, 2015

And the winner is......

Still not sure.  I have been experimenting with 3D Studio Max, Showcase, Lumion and Artlantis.
The last two I cannot use as they are demo programs, so the answer so far is Autodesk Cloud.

Artlantis, because I happened to stop by an architect in town who said their man who did renders
used Artlantis.

Then just to add to my confusion, I today saw a Youtube demo of Twinmotion.  This got me so excited, I had to download a copy.

The wonderful demo is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_t3wPVyBHo

Shame it costs NZ3,000.....Looks fantastic.

This is my first paying (well hopefully!) job doing renders, so here are the two that the
customer considered acceptable, done using Autodesk's cloud rendering service.



Just to  make me really depressed, here is a pic done for the same customer, but by someone else other than me:


I suspect he has used Artlantis, but  I am not sure. When I first saw it I thought it was a photograph. Sure makes my ones look amatuerish. (I am not good looking, but I am cheap!)

There is a man who has a good take on the thirteen deadly sins of architectural rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQM7FNjGAHA.

This one was using Showcase. I had a thin white line come up in the brick texture, I do not
know why- there is no equivalent one vertically.  It was a home made material, downloaded off
the brickmaker's site.


This one is using 3DSudio Max, which came out a bit over exposed.


This one is using Artlantis.  I found that spotlights come into Artlantis as cones....grr!


An interior shot using 3DStudio Max.  Note the tiny pillows.  I have Paint.exe, a free
photo editor, and try as I might, I cannot make those cushions bigger!


An Interior shot using Artlantis.  The windows in the side of the house decided not to show up.


Also evident is my  problems of having a wall on top of another wall, over the said windows.
The top is weatherboard, the bottom is brick. I modified the brick wall to have a notch in it to
accomodate the weatherboard one, but once they got in place they all stuck together!

I tried trimming, splitting and unjoining, but no use, so it is off to Youtube to find the
answer.

I did end up with a video that has a title, Logo and music, which can be seen at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy4iPscLGSo

Now I have used up all my cloud credits, I will have to turn up the settings on 3D Studio Max....that is if I can bring myself to go through all this again.








Saturday, August 22, 2015

Lord won't you buy me Vray addon and Photopaint?

A few years ago I bought  a copy of Viz, which was around 2004 or so, and it was an architectural version of 3D Studio.  I tried to make a living from rendering, but found it nigh on impossible.

Others may have had more success, due to their cleverness in figuring out how to produce a good render. I went  back to ordinary drafting.

As part of my Revit training, I looked at Real Estate ads and in particular houses not yet built.
I came across renderings, which I thought looked OK, but I thought that I could produce similar quality or better.  Here is an example of something used to sell a house:


The trees and sky are good, but the rest is hardly photographic quality.
So I emailed  a couple of real estate people with this, as an example of what I could do:


This was modelled in Revit and rendered in Revit, and while it was Ok, it was not that wonderful, so I had to pitch my price accordingly.  Because you can do stuff in Revit quickly, I put down some ridiculously cheap prices for this service, assuming that all renders would be done in Revit.

This is part of my email:
I have posted on youtube a video of this particular house, which I have modelled in Revit, an architectural drawing program. Please feel free to use this if you like it. All you have to do is email your client a link. The video gives a clearer idea of what the house actually looks like.



This is the link for the Helicopter:
https://youtu.be/BiSDuLl2xds

This is the Walkthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so5X-XCcZ9U

Price List: (Plans can be supplied to me in PDF, JPG or hand drawn sketch)

Helicopter view of house: $100 + GST

This includes: Helicopter Movie and one "walkthrough", both uploaded to Youtube, plus 4 rendered external views as shown below.

Internal Views: $50 + GST per view,


An example shown below. This is contingent on the Helicopter view being ordered.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Eventually I had a bite from someone, and I did the renders and sent them off. That was a week ago, so I am guessing they did not like the quality.

This is a snip from my email to them:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The videos have been posted on Youtube, here are the links:

1. Inside walk in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dekbAdQG-1w

2. Cinematic orbit.
https://youtu.be/dOOKrV4rPsg

You will see that the quality of the cinematic orbit is higher, this is because I have turned up the resolution for that one.

The movies were done in a program that allowed me to easily alter the materials to close to the ones you needed.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Here is one of the renders, again, done in Revit:



The movies I did were done in Autodesk Showcase. Because I have the Building Suite, I thought, how hard would it be to use 3DStudio Max to produce a higher quality render? Turns out, quite hard!
I spent days looking at videos on Youtube showing you how to do this, but the guys who seem to know what they are doing all use an add on called VRAY, and Photoshop.

Here is an example, this man has excellent presentation skills, showing how it is done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgeV7HurmFI

Plus he had Photoshop to tart up the grass image-in Revit, it looks like an enthusiastic cricket fan had done the lawns.
So here is my best shot, a little on the overexposed side:



It took 1 and 3/4 hours to render. Notice the windows at the front are not exactly behaving- I think it may be that I have not sorted out the glass material.

I have a trial copy of Lumion and decided to have a play with that to see what standard it came up with, and here is the result:



To get this I had to install a free add on from Lumion that enabled me to make a .dae file, an this worked really well. Once you get the little ways of Lumion understood it seems fairly easy to use.
To really get a feel for what Lumion is capable of, check out this link:

http://forum.lumion3d.com/gallery-best-works/american-diamond/

Not blown away by that? Should be!
So what is the answer? Well, this is all in NZ$,
VRay- around $1500
Photshop around $1000
Lumion Standard around $3000
Lumion Pro around $6000.

My obvious course is to stay at the low end, and keep marketing? Especially given the low prices I have quoted. I did come unstuck big time on the above house spending 11 hours on the modelling in Revit alone, so the prices are way under what they should be. It was the custom windows and doors that took all the time though.
The house at the top of the blog though took only 2 hours to knock up from a pdf.







Sunday, July 19, 2015

Wall layers at different heights and misbehaving windows

Wall Layers

Would it not be nice if software developers put meaningful labels on their buttons?

Here is a typical example in Revit: You want to let the weatherboards hang down a little lower than the main framing.  How to do this? Well, covered very well in this blog here:

http://www.revitzone.com/3d-modelling/182-walls-extending-individual-layers

To get to the part you need, you hit a button marked "Preview".  Not intuitive.

This is the dialog box:


Then you get another dialog box with a side view on it, where you click on the layer you want to alter then you unlock it.  Then you come back out back to the Properties and you find that you can now edit the "Base Extension Distance".  Admittedly, what would you label that button?  "Hit this to stuff around with wall layers different base offsets"?  Obviously not enough room for that...Or how about:
"Wall Layer Modifications"  or "To Alter Wall Layers"? Even then, how would you know to click on the layer and unlock it?

I guess it is one of those "need to know" things that all software seems to have.

Misbehaving Windows

A friend is making  a set of wooden windows for an architecturally designed house.  I thought this would be a good opportunity to demonstrate my skills in detailing in 3D the details of the strange track system for the sliding door.  The architect did not want a guiding track to be visible as you exit the door.  The solution was to put the track under the sill.  I had not any real problems drawing up the brackets and roller for the door, as seen below:


The fun came when I chose to insert it into the project.  It would not go in.  After getting the problem solved by going to the Autodesk Revit discussion group, the sins of my family were put on display.
My sin was to have a certain thickness of wall in the family and another one in my project.  Not so bad but somehow I had managed to constrain the door part to the wall.  A constraint not needed as it happens!

In the process of detailing the rollers and so on, I have come to realise there are no fasteners in "out of the box" Revit.  Why not? I guess they are already overloaded in the download department.  Could they not make it a separate download? OOPs! Just did a google check and Autodesk Seek has them!

See http://seek.autodesk.com/category/locale/USRevitStr/05090-Metal+Fastenings











Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Revit Frustrations

You can have a bit of fun with Revit.  Designing houses.

The drudgery begins when you have to annotate stuff like a roof truss layout.

I have this crazy idea that if I prepare a full set of construction documents, I can use these to get a job. I'm almost put off by my attempts to do this, compared to using plain old Autocad.

Part of the problem is my choice of paper size.  I chose A3, thinking it would be nice and cheap to get photocopied as opposed to as A2.   My set of plans done back in 2005 used A2, consequently text sizes were able to be a lot smaller, and the plans could be at 1:50, not 1:100.

This is the difference:

This first one is the Autocad one done in 2005


This is the Revit one.  Looks very crappy!

I have ended up with the second floor structure horning in on things, because it is made out of wood framing, as is the roof framing!  To get the ground floor framing to appear nicely dotted, proved a bridge too far, as overriding the visibility graphics with a dashed line did not seem to work.

To mark the lintel positions, I resorted to a filled region rectangle. Why does Revit not have a polyline tool?

Then I got into changing the scale of the plan from 1:50 to 1:100, and found my section bubbles disappeared.  Half an hour of internet searching later, I find there is a little button on the view properties called the View Scale, and you have to change this.

Then I see that my Level that I labelled Ground Level Lower decided 1 line was not enough and put it on 2 lines.  Fine, except that the word Ground ended up on top of the number and with seemingly no way of moving any of the items or specifiying only one line, I gave up in disgust.

I can only imagine the frustration levels of some Revit beginners, under pressure to get some plans out the door, and they come across this sort of stuff.  

I thought it might be instructional to download a set of Revit plans for a plain old New Zealand house. You would think there would be hundreds available for download.  Nope. Zip. NADA!

Maybe I am looking in the wrong places?



Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Just a post on Posts

Well, here I am 6 months later and still not a Revit Guru.  Admittedly, I did have to shift house in there somewhere.  I downloaded the building suite stuff and had fun with Showcase- see my Youtube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y58uSkHQvgk

I am at the quite nice position now where I can watch a Revit video and say things like: "He should have done that in 3D", and "Does he not know to extend a fascia by the grip on the end?"
Then I look at some of the sites talked about below and realise, I am still around 40%.  It would be better to be around 80%.

I have dropped my resume at about 3 architectural practices here in my small town near Auckland.
No luck so far.  I cannot really blame them really, as they want people with about 1 -2 years experience.  With my yearly subscription rolling up in about 6 weeks, I may have to take the hard decision of pulling the plug on software upgrades.  I have the building suite - ie Autocad, Revit etc.

There seems to be quite a demand for such people at the moment, but the situation in NZ is by no means sure as we are not getting enough for our dairy produce to give a lively economy.

I find I am getting stuck on alleyways in Revit and going around in circles, because I do not understand the basic principles of modelling in Revit.

All the bits below came about because I wanted to draw a simple day light angle- the sort that goes up by 2m then back in at and angle of 45 degrees to give an allowable building envelope.

This led me to fences and topos :  all I want is to put a fence on a topo surface.  After much research, I found two different, but related techniques:

1. Use Dynamo to essentially draw a line in plan view on your topo and a fence magically appears.
You can check out this at http://plevit1.blogspot.kr/2015/04/railing-on-topography.html
This is a program by HyunWoo Kim, a Korean who seems to be immensely intelligent and a very clever user of Revit.  You do have to download the Dynamo file and the family it uses, and install Dynamo on your Revit as an add-in.

2. Draw mass on  top of your topo, then draw a reference curve on the edge where it intersects.  Then you Divide this curve into a series of points, in this case 2000mm.
You can check out this method at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ3KIgOyzkE
Again, you need to either download a family, or make your own.  This guy does a very good job of explaining himself as he goes along, producing a tube style handrail that does the job nicely.  At the end he shows the same method , but for a standard wooden fence this time.  Unfortunately there is no explanation of how the family was constructed, leaving me to struggle for 3 days on my own.

Time for a pic of one of the blind alleys:

As you can see the post ended up a bit tilted.  This could be useful one day?

Success came with much effort later:
Fence posts....Hooray!
After even more effort came:
Which is where I am going to declare a minor victory, though the picky might grumble that there are no planks or stringers shown.

All this is enabled through the creation of an adaptive family, which is used in  both of the methods mentioned above.

Easy enough to make after the explanation given in the Youtube videos, except for the panel bit.

In the end, I just banged in 4 reference points, then drew a model line using those points, and made a shape out of them , setting the extrusion value to 20mm.


In the end, I could not get the Dyanmo one to work on my topo, which I suspect is because my topo is 85m up off the ground level.  

The Dynamo one is definitely the quicker of the two, and I predict this is where Revit is heading to.
Have a look at HynWoo Kim's spanish tile roof demo - mind blowing!



Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Using Autocad solids versus Revit for a residential house

In New Zealand we have these styles of houses called "California Bungalows".  They were fashionable around 1920 or so.  Their characteristics are: Wooden framing, wooden weatherboards, wooden windows and a corrugated iron roof.  They usually had a bow window.

Here is an example:



I have "happened" on a set of plans which were about extending one of these, and used it to sharpen my Revit skills. Confirmation that Autocad would be a silly way of doing one of these houses would require the same house to be drawn in Autocad solids.

In the Autocad process I found it necessary to draw 14 different but similar windows to suit the various sizes needed.  This seemed to take forever, even using my special lisp routine to draw wooden windows automatically.  It would have taken a lot longer manually doing them from scratch.

You can catch a video of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMLeBgPqOqs

Of course you end up cutting and stretching similar ones, but it is still a lengthy process.

I drew the Autocad one first and then the Revit one second.  Half way through the Revit one I ran out of steam, due to a diversion into the land of families.  I have made several wooden window families, but do not consider myself an expert on these as yet.  For instance: do you make them for one wall thickness or should they adapt to all?  So only a few windows were made.  Half way through this process I realised I should be using "nested families".  This is where you make a sash that fits in several windows.  Again, this is a lengthy process, and full of learning curves.

Here is the Autocad house:



Straight away you can see that there are no materials applied (but they could be).

Here is the same house in Revit:

Here you can see the outer cladding is showing up, as is the "tin" roof. 

With the Autocad drawing the best way to approach the floor plan is to xref the model into a completely new file, and issue the SECTION  command. Here are the results of doing that:


This is just a screen shot (built into Autocad but not revit-all my Revit pics here are using the Windows Snipping Tool).

The Revit one is automatic and looks like this:
This looks a bit more up market than the Autocad one- I would have had to  add doors manually in the Autocad one. Score 1 here for Revit.

Now we get into the "symbolic lines" thing of Revit.  As I understand it, you can draw a window family in Revit, and only bits of it will come out in a plan view.  The reason for this is performance, and at a 1:50 scale is there any point in getting excited?

Here is an Autocad window section:



As you can see, all the solids are shown realistically.

This is a Revit window section, one which I did not add symbolic lines to:


I can hear someone saying, "Ah yes, but you can add these symbolic lines to the window family!"
Well, yes you can, but make sure that they are all constrained and locked, otherwise they go all over the place.  I am tempted to say "Score 1" for Autocad here.

Sectional views:

Here is the Autocad one:




Not pretty, but mostly there.

The Revit one shows the doors, so maybe a score for Revit on this one:

Notice the Revit one has a generic "thick roof", with no purlins shown.  They could have been.  It seems an uphill mission to do a roof with rafters/purlins/tin in Revit.  I am probably doing it the wrong way. The normal way is to probably draw them in using 2D lines.  It is also a pain to do in Autocad, but placement is easier and more precise. The nice thing about doing them in solids is that the roof plan is ready to go.

Here is my double sash window: 



I am quite pleased with this, especially the horizontal transom which misbehaved until I struck on the novel idea of locking all the lines together in the outline of the extrusion then having just one locating dimension, as shown in this side view:

This window can cope with user defined sill height, height, width and distance down to the transom from the top.  Making double, treble and quadruple ones can wait until I actually get a job that needs them.

Maybe I am not looking in the right places, but I could not find a Youtube video of transoms with strange profiles, and how to do them. 

Conclusions:

Autocad is a great general drafting/modelling program, of great antiquity (around 1982).  That you can model a house in it speaks volumes for it's versatility.  Revit on the other hand just does buildings, although it can draw things like ovens and range hoods for use as content.

The fact that I had to draw 14 different Autocad windows indicates this could be a time waster on most jobs if you used Autocad.  On the plus side for Autocad is the precision and ease of placing things like rafters and so on.  It has to be said though that Revit's beam system would be the equivalent of this, one which needs practice to get used to coming from an Autocad background.

I have not looked into the automation side of Revit, but no doubt something could be done to produce  a roof that has rafters/purlins/tin all in one hit.

Revit has a very easy to use rendering system, and would score better in production of door and window schedules, especially as any change any where is reflected in all views. In Autocad, you would make changes to your model, then go into the sectional drawing and press the update button on the section tool.

Revit's materials seem to be built in, so concrete comes out hatched in a section as concrete.  To get the same in Autocad you would have to have no hatching in the sectional view and then add concrete hatching manually.

Getting your window content directories full means trips to a site where you have to pay for such things.  One in NZ is: http://www.cadcontent.co.nz/

To sum up then: Revit is a winner over Autocad if you are drawing houses. 





Friday, February 20, 2015

More on Revit Massing

My last post was a bit cryptic, so here is a slightly more verbose version:

You create a Mass family file.  In the creation of the file you have good control over the solids you are drawing and the file I drew ended up looking like this:


A bit grey and bland.  

Then you open a new project and bring in this family.  Then it is just a matter of choosing the Massing & Site tab and picking on say Roof and picking what you want to be a roof etc.

Then it ends up looking like this:


Of course at some stage in a perspective view like this you have to hide in the view the mass, otherwise it shows through as a grey shape under everything. This building shown has been moved on from this stage - it seems architecture might be an iterative process after all?





Monday, February 16, 2015

Revit Massing: It's a wonderful thing

So excited that I actually got something done!

Looking at this series of 3 videos certainly helped.  The only drawback is the audio quality, but the series is easy to understand and copy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Uo8gIc1YU

I can imagine the average architect would be impressed by the ease of use of massing.


This all took about 1/2 hour to do.

Time to stop mucking around?

My Revit journey is inching towards something or other.  Namely, a certain level of competence in the use of Revit.

To this end, Robin has kindly lent a book, "Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011" by Eddy Krygiel, Phil Read and James Vandezande.  A total of 1122 page, and weighs in around 2.3 kg.  Not a complete beginners book it goes into such areas as Film and Stage and Revit in the Cloud , which I am not going study.

Up until now, I have just picked up a project done previously in Autocad and redrawn it in Revit.
While useful, it seems a bit of a disorganised approach.  So I have taken stock of what I do know, and used the headings in the book as a guide for a sequence of study to be undertaken.

This is my list:

1. Advanced modelling and Massing
2. Walls and Curtain Walls
3. Floors, Ceilings and Roofs
4. Family Editor
5. Stairs and Railings
6. Detailing
7. Documentation
8. Annotating
9. Presentation

My present situation is that I threw in my mechanical drafting job on the 19th January 2015, hoping to get a change of scene by drafting houses instead.  This ties in with a desire to work at home, seeing as I have Revit 2015, along with Autocad etc.  I have approached about 8 local architects with an offer of a fixed price per square metre for residential house drafting, but no takers as yet.

Just trolling through other Reviteer's blogs is a depressing journey: I realise how little I know.

Some blogs stand out, this one I like and will be going back to: http://revitrants.blogspot.co.nz/

Just because drawing a wall and inserting a wall is very easy in Revit can lead you into the false idea that this is an easy program to master.



Saturday, February 14, 2015

Is it just me? Or......

I feel a little bit like the old saying: " Ohhh look, there's my Johnny marching with all the other soldiers.  Pity they are out of step except him!"




It seems like nobody on Youtube is drawing truss and frame roofing as we make houses here in
New Zealand.

Another thing is it seems all Revit projects start with the walls. In real life it starts with the site.
Luckily on this project (already built from 2D Autocad drawings) I had access to the surveyors drawings which even had the contours in 3D ready to go.

Interestingly, this import showed the ground levels were slightly out as far as the original drawings were showing. Score One for Revit.

After an unnecessary diversion into Autocad Architecture to use the Drape command and then bringing that into Revit and finding that was not a lot of fun, I used the button marked "Create from Import", and this seemed to work OK.

It seems Revit is so simple to use in the ordinary tasks such as inserting walls doors and windows, but agonisingly difficult in the complicated bits- eg inserting beam systems.  I guess even they will feel straightforward after much use.  Getting the right level or even reference plane is sometimes like a blind man in an unfamiliar room.  Nobody else seems to have these problems.

Still, they might have had proper training!

One little feature I found really cool is if you click on a roof, it becomes transparent, showing the structure below.




Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Beginning Revit, from Autocad

It has been said it is much better to have never touched Autocad before starting Revit.

I have found this to be true, although some things are very similar.

I have made some blunders, as seen below, but I managed to avoid the first one.

This is a pic of  a timber window family, created after much ripping out of hair.

Classic Revit Blunders

1. Want  to have a family, but not quite like the one "out of the box"?
Yup, just go ahead and alter the one that is "out of the box".
This is a classic beginner mistake. ALWAYS Duplicate and name it as something else.

2. Creating new family?  Hmm....where to store it?  Oh look, there are already libraries there,
what a good place to store them.  NOT! Seems like a sensible idea, but if you do a reinstall,
they will get deleted.  Create a new directory somewhere else.  Would it not be nice if
Revit came with a sensibly created directory structure? I like the English way of doing this.

Even then it seems the Revit approach is to lump all things together, then let you sort out what you are after by looking at the name of the file.  So all Aluminium ones are in with the wood.

This seems a very dis-organised approach, so I have created this style of directories, eg,  Components, Doors, Aluminium, Front Doors/Sliding Doors/French Doors/Bifold Doors.  There would be a similar one for Wood.

I see Salesoft (The Auckland New Zealand Revit Reseller) has a set of families for sale,
known as RVT Pacifica, and their naming convention for windows seems to make some sense.

This is an exerpt from their help file:

"All NZ defined Families can be identified by the suffix (NZ) used in the Family file name.
For example: AW 11 Timber-Architrave (NZ).rfa

The Window family Naming Convention used in RVT Pacifica is based on Opening types used in the frame followed by the frame divisions as they are seen from an exterior view and lastly any construction / material description.

The first few characters of the first 'field' denotes the window hung type.
For example…
AW = AWning hung sash window
BF = BiFold hinged unit
BOX = Box Window (under soffit unit)
CA = CAsement hung sash window
CW = Corner Window
DH = Double Hung window
FL = Fixed Lite glass window
GH = Glass House window (glass on top)
LVR = LouVRe window (sash or shutter)
OP = OPening only (no content)
SS = Sliding Sash window
SG = ShugG vertical sliding glass window
TH = Top Hinged sash window

The next 'field' is used to indicate the number of divisions along the frame and the number
of divisions vertically in each of those horizontal divisions.
For example…
  1 = single lite opening
11 = two one lite divisions
12 = two horizontal spaced divisions with 1 lite in the first and two lites in the second

If the window needs to have a specific Left or Right opening designated then the last character
of this field is used to assign which horizontal division has the opening lite. For example…
AW 11R  would be for a two lite with right opening sash.
But usually there is a Flip Control that switches the window around so there is no need for
a specific Left or Right family definition."

(end of help file)

The problem in New Zealand is that we seem to have joinery peculiar to this part of the world.
Even the name is different to the USA: they call it Millwork.

An even larger problem looms with the Master Joiners Federation of New Zealand proposing a
standard set of tested windows, and Revit families of these do not seem to be in existence yet.

The "out of the box" wooden windows available are not exact representations of normal joinery, being very simplified.  Does this matter? Probably depends how fussy you are!