A Stinkin' Simple Railing - Part 1

When long-time users pour so much passion and energy trying to make Revit better through constant feedback, they eventually get burned out and exhausted when they do not see significant change, version after version. Sadly, I find myself in that situation and it is getting harder to stay positive about Revit, even though it is still my preferred software of choice (how about that for leverage?). The way Autodesk have been treating its development these last couple of years is nothing short of appalling. They seem to have forgotten the “works like an Architect thinks” mantra and sadly too often Revit seems to work like a clunker and thinks like a delusional Architect instead. The API keeps improving, which is great, but I expect a heck of a lot more from the exposed part of a platform that is briskly coming up to its 14th birthday since becoming commercially viable. If software age is more like dog years, one can safely say that Revit is no teenager.

In the spirit of (desperately) trying to stay positive, I’d like to write about all the problems with the “new” railing tools. Nowadays for Autodesk, “new” means less than 20% completion. I wish I had that luxury myself, so I’ll just roll around in envy for the time being.

I documented these while trying to build a simple, wall-mounted handrail commonly found in fire escape stairs. Since there are too many issues to list and document in one post, I’ll do it in multiple parts so I can be of service to my loyal readers. Some might not see this as being positive but in my book, the first task on the path to improvement, is to acknowledge your problems. I will suggest workarounds and best-practices where possible.

Some bugs have been resolved in Revit 2014, but not all projects I deal with are in that version (actually as of now, very few are). Template versioning has become a real headache where things work differently depending on what template version a project was started from: the upgrading process alone is unlikely to guarantee nirvana. Note that everything I’ll be posting about has been confirmed through Autodesk Support.

BUG #1	Occurs up to
Posts in “old” railing on “new” stair	Revit 2013 SP3*

STATUS: Resolved in Revit 2014 SP1 *only if you start a project from a 2014 template.

If you had a previously working old railing definition that used posts to define extensions and you used it on the “new” assembled stair, the posts do not display in plan. Your existing projects are not going to get fixed through an upgrade to Revit 2014. In this case you’re going to have to re-build them with a different railing definition. As you can see below on the left, the railing works on old sketched stair definitions but not on the assembled stair. If you start a project from a new 2014 template and copy & paste the faulty railing definition shown on the right, it works. Why not when upgraded? I have no clue.

 

BUG #2	Occurs up to
Terminations not visible in plan	Revit 2014 SP2

STATUS: Unresolved

Termination families do not represent themselves in plan views but when you hover over the railing, you see the invisible outline of the termination family. Visibility should be controlled through the family subcategory and detail levels, but this is not happening. So if you were thinking creatively of using a termination as a railing extension to get around other buggy behavior, forget it.

 

BUG #3	Occurs up to
Align tool on supports doesn’t work right	Revit 2014 SP2

 

STATUS: Unresolved

The align tool does not work correctly on supports when handrails are sloped. When they are flat everything is fine, but if it slopes (which is the most common), the support is moved by the incorrect distance and it takes several subsequent alignments to get it close to where you want it - it never properly aligns, just keeps getting closer and closer. Workaround: Use the move tool in lieu of Align.

Stay tuned for more bugs and “as designed” issues. Happy New Year!

A Stinkin' Simple Railing - Part 1

Stairs and railings

I'm really excited to see the upcoming stairs and railing tools in Revit 2012. I have no idea why they were not covered by other bloggers in the past weeks. I'll do my best to work up some examples and post back. Stay tuned!

Stairs and railings

Stair-Master

Happy New Year! Gosh, I missed giving you all the traditional Holiday wishes and now we’re already halfway through the first month of the year. By now we’ve all made our resolutions and some have already committed to losing weight and getting in shape (yeah rrrright!). So I’ll try redeeming myself by posting about stairs and discuss how I used them recently on a project, and what issues I encountered.

As many others I am now working on billable projects. I love working on projects by the way, but it’s hard to juggle both roles of giving Revit support and being responsible for project delivery, deadlines, etc., especially on projects with tight schedules and low manpower. It’s becoming more common to be asked to do more with less, right? So now a little bit about the project: it was an addition & renovation of a High School stadium which included a new Press Box and ticket booth; an expansion of the Visitor grand stand, toilet facilities and ticket booth; upgrading the existing field-house and building another one; a new 2 story AD’s office and staff development facility; and plenty of site-work, miscellaneous projects and fencing upgrades. Over the next series of posts I plan on posting some tips & tricks learned with regards to sweeps in walls and share the techniques used to do phased site work (existing, demo and new construction). Today I’ll be concentrating on the grandstand structure.

When I got started in August, I needed to model the existing concrete structure and decided to try the stair tool for the precast bleachers. I wanted to push the tool to see if I could get the required representation. Here’s a snippet of a structural section drawing. Do you think it’s possible to model this with stairs?

I didn’t think it was, but after playing around a little bit with the Nosing Profile, I was able to get the desired result.

One of the positives of this approach is that now you have a host for your railings, which makes adding intermediate rails and guardrails quick and easy. Using railings, it is also very easy to add steps between the bleacher rows. How? Make steps as balusters and create a railing definition with balusters only, at the correct spacing. You can also extend this idea to the seating but I decided to stick with line-based families in my case (not shown below).

One of the problems I ran into is when having to insert openings, such as Vomitory exits (I hate that term!). I was forced to split the grandstands into multiple stair sections. It would be great if the shaft tool was able to cut through stairs.

You probably want to see the stand as a continuous structure in plan, but dividing into multiple stairs results in lines between these segments which you probably don’t want to see. You have to use the linework tool to set these lines to <invisible> in multiple plan views, which can get a bit tedious.

Plan representations work quite well. You have subcategory control of steps above the cut line, making them easy to turn off. The only issue I noticed with the step railing mentioned above is that depending on where the cutplane was set, the step before the cut line disappeared even though it should have been visible.

Fine-tuning the view’s cutplane made this issue less evident. The other problem I ran into was when setting up a reflected ceiling plan of the underside of the press-box. By default, Revit does not represent steps in RCP views and the user cannot control this. My workaround was to overlay a correctly oriented 3D view with only stairs showing over an RCP view in a sheet. Use the section box to crop out elements so your view matches the view range of the RCP.

Note that the raker beams that support the bleachers were built with a custom Structural Framing family to obtain the required representation. Overall, stairs have worked quite well for this particular condition and I wouldn’t hesitate to use them again in the future. Do you have other tips and suggestions? Did you find better ways to solve similar conditions? Feel free to comment on this post!

Stair-Master