AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 20)

REVIT STRUCTURE Structural Stairs Staircases are architectural, right? Or are they structural? When I think of a wood staircase, I think architecture. When I think of a steel C channel stringer and concrete treads, I think Structure. It’s always a gray area during the project, too. For the record, Revit thinks they are architectural. All you Revit Structure people know what this means, right? Visibility Graphics and View Type! To even think about adding a staircase in Revit Structure you have to open which Tab on the Design bar? You guessed it, the Architectural tab. I opened with that little rant for a reason. Nothing can be more frustrating than placing an object in your model, then spending half an hour picking at different dialogs to get the display correct. So to begin the discussion on modeling stairs in Revit Structure, you first have to open a model or start a new one. Second, you need to open the view in which you are going to start modeling your stairs (I would hope that you use several views to model a staircase). Now it’s time to start turning on some stuff (or verify that specific items are turned on). If you type VG you will gain access to the Visibility/Graphics Overrides dialog. Remember, this controls the visibility for this view and this view only. In the Model categories tab, you need to make sure that stairs are turned on. You also need to make sure railings are turned on (trust me, this is going to become important). What’s that? You can’t find railings in the list? Remember my opening rant? To even get railings to show up in this list, you need to toggle on “Show Categories from all disciplines” at the bottom of the dialog. Get that turned on and you are set. Now for the fun stuff! Where do we start? How about the fact that the ONE stringer type Revit provides to build a staircase with is about 25 percent useful. Yeah, let’s start there. It sure would be nice if Revit allowed us to use a profile as 20 a railing. Did I say railing? I meant to say stringer. That gives me an idea. Revit does allow you to use a profile as a railing, right? So maybe if I said that I didn’t want any stringers, and used a railing as my stringers, I’ll be in business! Let’s try it. Say, for instance, I have a set of stairs that require a big C channel as a stringer. First you need In the Project Browser, navigate down the list until you come to the Families section. Notice there is a Stairs category. Expand Stairs, and double click on 7" max riser 11" tread. It’s a good start. Click Duplicate… and call the new stair Empty Pan. Once the new stair has been created, scroll down to the Stringer category. For The Right Stringer, select None. For the left Stringer, select None also. Once you are done with the stairs, find Railings in the Project Browser under Families. You can expand the railings category and find Handrail. Double-click on Handrail and then click Duplicate. This will allow you to make a railing. The example I am using for this article is a C10x30, and this is what I am naming the “railing.” In the Rail Structure parameter, you will see a long Edit button. Click it and you will be sent to the Edit Rails dialog. You will have to take a couple passes at the offsets to get the railing positioned exactly where you would like it. Once it is set, it will work in most situations. In this example, you can see that the name of the profile is Channel, the Height is -5" (half of the channel size Figure 1 Figure 2 to physically get the channel you want into the model. Using the File menu, go to Load From Library>Family… Then browse to \ Imperial Library\Profiles\Structural\Steel\ C-Channel-Profile.rfa. Grab a couple C channel sizes. Remember which one you are going to use! You will be using it later in a family. to center it on the stairs), the profile, of course, is the C-Channel-Profile: C10x30. Click OK when you are finished to get back to the Revit model and out of the railing completely. Now, you can either drag and drop the stair into the model from the ProjectBrowser, or go to the Architectural tab on w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.augi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008

AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008 Contents The CAD Manager 2008 Salary Survey Save Time with Impression Blocks In the Family Way Structural Stairs Autodesk University 2008 Preview Action Recorder How to Embrace Third-Party Data On the Back Page

AUGIWorld Magazine - September/October 2008

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