Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Attaching a wall to a stair

For those of you trying to attach a curved wall to the underside of a stair:
1. Model a stair and a wall (stair hidden below)
2. Model an in-place family of the floor or roof category (shown below)
3. Use extrusions for steps (ex. below). Use a swept blend for a sloping ramp or monolithic stair
4. Attach the top of wall to this in-place family
5. Set the in-place family as temporary (ie. phase created and phase demolished are the same)
 
I'm sure you can imagine many more uses for temporary elements.
 


Monday, May 19, 2014

Rooms that travel incognito

If you've ever worked on a split level home or other structure you've probably noticed that Revit won't let you freely change the grayed out level instance parameter of placed rooms the way you can with most other placed families.

My workaround to this problem always involved cutting the room from one view and pasting it into a view with the desired associated level.  This method usually renumbers the room creating a duplicate "not placed" room in the room schedule and usually also requires the tagging of a room again.

If you'd like to keep a room number and the tag, consider grouping the room first.  You should now have access to the level in your model group instance properties to re-host rooms at will. A room disguised as a group can apparently defy gravity.

EDIT (05.23.2014): Luke Johnson points out that this method does assign a new element ID.

EDIT (03.11.2015): Rather that cutting the room from one view and pasting it into a view with the desired associated level, which creates a duplicate room, consider deleting the room from one view and placing the same room again from your options bar dropdown of available rooms.  Room Number and other parameters are still present, you lose your room tag and need to open another plan view, but you preserve your Element ID.