Friday, October 13, 2006

Building Pad Tips

A building pad will cut the topography down or raise topography up to the elevation you need for cut and fill. The building pad tool does not allow for sloping pads yet. Here are a few tips for managing building pads.

1. Let's say your grade slopes up to the building and you want to show (in your elevations) exactly where the grade meets the building. Well, Revit will not create this line for you and there is no way to join the geometry of a toposurface to a wall to get the grade line to show. So, you'll have to sketch a building pad along the perimeter of your building footprint to get the grade line at building footprint to show.

2. Now let's say you need several building pads at different elevations for your slabs on grade, crawlspaces, and basements. If these pads share edges you'll notice right away that if you overlap pads in the slightest bit you'll get the following error message: "Pads can't overlap (but can share edges)." My first try at multiple building pads with shared edges I learned a very important lesson (after hours of effort). Using the align tool to align edges of your pads so they can share an edge often doesn't work no matter how many hours you waste trying to align edges. So, rather than aligning edges when you have multiple building pads with shared edges do this instead... after you sketch your first building pad... copy the shared portion of your sketch to the clipboard... finish your sketch... move on to your next building pad... and paste the contents of your clipboard (shared edges) into your new building pad sketch. This method of copying shared edges from one pad and pasting them into the adjactent pad will save you hours of wasted effort trying to align shared edges of building pads that just won't cooperate any other way.

Hope these tips help you save hours of work trying to manage building pads.

5 comments:

David said...

I tried placing sub regions and building pads at elevations higher than the plan view cut height in a sloping topography. As far as I can tell cut earth is displaying properly when sub regions and building pads are placed above.

We typically don't like to see cut earth in plan views.

Unknown said...

I also got frustrated pretty quickly with aligning pads, but I found a solution with a few less steps. Set the Visibility Depth to below the existing pad's depth. Use Pick Line with a 0'0" offset to pick the pad line you want to share. Then Trim to cut or extend the shared line to the rest of your new pad sketch---don't use the shared line's grips.
Actually, I use the same process to align the pad to walls and other features too.

SamK said...

Hi there,
I am a high school student and am also having trouble with the shared building pads. I understand the concept of copying and pasting the shared components however this isn't working for me, the error still appears. 'Krackpot's' method sound as though it too would work however i don't understand it. Any tips or rules to follow with D. Duarte's method?? Or another method which too works?

Unknown said...

Hi David, intersting trick, i have applied it on subergion operation and worked very well. Now, making building pads, is normal to take so long to regenerate the model every time after I sketch a building pad, I am working in a doble cuore duo, 4gb Ram, but in 32 bits.

David said...

Jose,

It may take a while to regenerate if you have a lot of views open. To make the process of site editing faster make sure you close all open windows (except the one you're working in).