#06 | 2D People — The Family that Obeys Revit Rules

From CAD Block to Native Revit Family

If you've ever imported a DWG block into a Revit project to populate a floor plan with human silhouettes, you already know how it turns out. The block imports at the wrong scale, doesn't respond to view scale changes, and any attempt to control its appearance through Visibility/Graphic Overrides turns into an uphill battle. CAD blocks in Revit are guests who don't follow the house rules.

The root problem is simple: a CAD block is not a Revit object. It doesn't know what a view scale is. It has no subcategories. It doesn't participate in the VG override system. It just sits there, indifferent.

There had to be a better way.

The first choice: Detail Item, not Generic Annotation

The first decision when building a 2D family in Revit is choosing the right template. The most obvious candidate might seem to be Generic Annotation — it's lightweight, it's 2D, it lives in views. But Generic Annotation has a critical flaw for this type of use: it's scale-dependent. What you draw at 50mm in the Family Editor appears at 50mm on the sheet, regardless of the view scale. A figure that looks right at 1:50 becomes a giant at 1:100.

The correct template is Detail Item. Detail Item Families are scale-independent — you draw them at real dimensions (a prone figure at 1700mm is drawn at 1700mm) and Revit automatically handles scaling based on the active view. Insert the family and it works, at any scale, in any view.

That single decision — Detail Item instead of Generic Annotation — is what separates a professional 2D family from a workaround.

The second choice: Filled Region, not Masking Region

Every family in the RMF 2D People collection is composed of three elements: the outer silhouette profile, the internal detail lines, and a filled region that gives visual depth to the figure and separates it from the underlying floor patterns.

For that fill, there are two candidates in Revit: Masking Region and Filled Region. Most 2D people families on the market use a Masking Region — it's fast, it covers underlying patterns, it does its job. But it has a significant limitation: the fill is always white. The user has no control over the color.

RMF 2D People instead uses a Filled Region. The difference is concrete: the fill color is fully controllable through VG Overrides, per view, non-destructively. The default value is a light gray (RGB 242-242-242) that creates depth without drawing attention to itself, but the user can modify, replace, or disable it entirely. The figure continues to cover underlying patterns in any case.

It's a small technical choice with a big practical impact.

The Flip Arrow

Each family in the collection includes a horizontal Flip Arrow — the same control mechanism used by doors and windows in Revit. Select the figure in the view, click the double arrow, and the figure instantly mirrors from left to right. No Mirror command, no axis to draw, no extra steps.

In a floor plan with multiple figures, being able to flip each one individually and directly in the view significantly speeds up composition. It's the kind of detail that doesn't appear in marketing, but becomes obvious the first time you use it.

Complete graphic control — from the user's side

A well-built Detail Item Family gives the user complete graphic control through standard Revit tools. With RMF 2D People you can:

• Adjust line weight and style by subcategory — separately for the outer profile and internal detail lines
• Override line color by subcategory, per view
• Modify fill color — background, foreground, pattern type — through VG Overrides
• Control the transparency of the filled region
  

Single instance override

Visibility/Graphic VG Overrides affect all Detail Items in the active view. When you need to control a single figure without affecting others, Revit offers a more precise tool.

Select the instance and go to Modify | Detail Items → Override Graphics in View → By Element. The element-specific overrides panel opens → View-Specific Element Graphics, where you can control:

• Visible — show or hide the selected figure in the active view
• Halftone — display the figure in halftone for a faded background effect
• Surface Pattern (foreground / background) — the foreground color (default RGB 242-242-242) can be activated or deactivated; the background color can be freely assigned with a custom pattern and color. Disabling the foreground exposes the background, allowing you to replace the default gray with any tone suitable for the drawing
• Transparency — allow floor or site patterns to show through to the desired level

Instance overrides apply only to the selected element in the active view. Everything else remains untouched.

For a deeper dive into how subcategories work and why they are important, you can read the article #03 | The invisible director: subcategories, symbolic lines, and controlling what appears.

The Inside the Files tip

Choose the template before drawing a single segment.
Detail Item or Generic Annotation is not a preference — it's the difference between a family that scales correctly in all views and one that behaves unpredictably. And choose Filled Region instead of Masking Region whenever the fill color might need to change: it will cost you zero extra seconds during modeling, and save you workarounds during use.

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Three packages, one collection

RMF 2D People – Top View is available in three packages: Walking, Reclining, and Seated — 52 families in total, all built on the same structure, the same subcategories, the same logic.

If you want to see how it works before purchasing, download a free family from the Marketplace and load it into a test project: the VG behavior is identical to that of the paid versions.