First RFI's from First Draft Family Spec

We sent out 3 families specified using our new outline spec to a contract firm. We recieved their first pass at creating the families, and additional questions/clarifications. In general we are happy with what we have received. There are a couple of instance where they either did not carefully read the specification, ignored it, or mis-understood. There were several more instances however where we either did not clearly write our spec, or we had contradictory information, or we assumed that certain assumptions would be made, and didn't give as much detail as was needed. Particular areas that we missed on; neglecting to specify the name of the .rfa file (we felt kinda foolish about this :) ), not giving enough examples regarding a naming convention, so they literally adopted the one example, failure to explain that rendering material parameters should be attached to some geometry, and perhaps biggest of all, we realized that even though we make mention of sub categories, and our master sub category list, we need to include a part in the outline spec that deals specifically with sub categories, and how and when they should be assinged to objects or pieces of an object.

In general the modeling, and parametrics were acceptable in the families. One interesting thing though, with regards to one of the specified families they took an approach completely opposite of how I created the same family. In general, we feel that my method for creating the same family allows for better performance, and more flexibility than their method. So we are going to attempt to convey that we don't want to be in the posistion of telling them exactly how to model a particular family, however there are "best practices" that we need them to take into consideration when creating a family. This is particulary tough, as there is not really a way to specify something like that, without laying out exactly how you would like to have a particular family created. We are still waiting for the results of the third family we specified, which was a dynamic parking ramp that includes transistions. This a complex family from the standpoint of some of the parametrics and formula writing, so we are curious to see what they come up with.