Now that we have the drawers in our joinery unit, I want to show you how to create a parameter which will allow you to hide or show the drawers. To do this we will need to create a visibility parameters.

Ok, let’s do this. Go to the front elevation, and click on the drawer. In the Properties Panel, there is a visibility parameter.

Select the visibility parameter, and then create a new one. Name it “Drawer 3 ON”. Click OK.

Go to the next drawer. Create a new parameter, and name it Drawer 2 ON. Click OK.

Do the same thing for Drawer 1.

That’s all you need to do to create a visibility parameter.

This gives us a lot of flexibility when modelling our families.

Just be aware that when you are inside the family environment, nothing happens if we turn these drawer on or off. To see the visibility parameter in action we need to load the family into the project environment.

Let’s create a new project to test this out. Go to File, new project. Go to browse, and find Australia.

Open Templates. Open Australia. Open Default-AUS-EN-U. Open it up. Load the joinery unit into the project.

Place it in front of this elevation and then change the scale to 1 to 20.

The joinery unit is facing here. Open the South elevation. Change the elevation scale to 1 to 20.

Actually, change the scale to 1 to 50.

Click on the joinery unit and then click edit type. Our visibility parameters are at the bottom of the dialog box. Let’s turn off drawers 3 and 2. Click OK.

Now, we just have one drawer on. We can create a few different types of joinery units. Click Edit Type and then click Duplicate. Name this one 3 Drawers ON.

Click duplicate again, and name this one 2 Drawers ON.

We’ve created two different types. Select the joinery unit and copy it. Copy it again. Select a joinery unit. In the Properties Panel drop down menu, select three drawers on.

Then click edit type, go to the bottom, and turn on all three drawers. Select another joinery unit, go to Edit Type, and make sure two drawers are on that type.

We can have different types of joinery units with different visibility parameters.

We’ll cover why these lines are no longer dashed in the next tutorial.