Okay, so this is my first "I hate Revit/Interior Design/my life" entry. I ran into my first snag in my senior project. It's not a huge deal, but it is incredibly irritating. Within my project I wanted to create a fire-rated exit stairwell. The kind of thing you'll find in any big commercial project. Stacked stairs. A potentially standard construction type of thing.
Guess what. Revit can't do that.
Revit can't make closed loop stairs. Basically, Revit can't do this:
I know what you're going to say, it looks like you made that in Revit. Actually, I got it from the RevitCity.com forums and haven't quite figured out how to incorporate it into my project.
You will find when drawing stairs that Revit will not let you draw over the top of any lines or "form closed loop". Essentially, you can't draw stairs on top of other stairs (even though the third run of stairs is above the first run in reality). It will give you an error like this.
So far, I've only been able to find one forum thread about this. And basically it just reiterates the fact that this can't be done and how shocked and angry we dorks are about it.
This brings up an interesting point of comparison between using and learning Revit and AutoCAD. When you learn AutoCAD, you learn how to draw a line. You learn how to draw a dashed line. You learn how much you hate line type scale. The drawings you draw in CAD are purely 2D symbols. The same four lines that form a rectangle can represent a coffee table, a bookcase, a countertop, and a bed. If I were drawing this in CAD, I would draw the lines that represent the stairs and be done with it. I probably wouldn't make a 3D model of it either because we've all seen a stairwell.
When you learn Revit, you have a completely different mode of thinking. Yes, rectangles represent all kinds of things in plan, but those lines are a coffee table, they are a countertop. Well, as much as a digital rendering can be anything. Revit users are also victim to a different set of problems. It's not, "I can't get my lines to be dashed." It's, "How do I attach a roof to a house." And because Revit creates the 3D for everything it can substantially slow down progress if you don't know how to fix problems quickly.
Remember though, you can always put any elevation or plan in Revit into AutoCAD.
That looks like awesome stuff. Autocad works magic when you know how to do it correctly.
ReplyDeleteRevit suffers from the same setbacks that 3D Kitchen Cabinet design did way back in the early 90’s, where the program does all kinds of things very quick & slick, but you soon find out that you are limited to the things the developers deemed worthy, and you become hostage to updates that you hope will work for you. I tried out Revit for the yacht maker (Burger Boat, Wisconsin) I worked for, and we rejected it quickly as it just could not do most of what we needed.
ReplyDeleteIf you design McHouses, Revit may be just fine -- but for anything else, Inventor is the way to go. Many Architectural firms will quickly find they need both. Good luck…
Mark Randa
http://opendesignproject.org
I don't get it-- why not just create multiple flights and stack them on one another? Stairs are level-dependent and there's only a field for a top and a base. Is it for scheduling that you want one continuous stair tower?
ReplyDeleteI struggled with issues like this when I was first learning Revit.. learning to stop thinking like I did with AutoCAD and ADT helped.
I wish there was a way for me to respond to comments! The issue was, my ceilings were very high. So I couldn't get to the second floor with two runs of stairs (well, I could, but the runs would be longer than I wanted them to be).
ReplyDeleteIf your floor-to-floor heights are the same, you can set your stair to run from Level 1 to Level 2, then set your "Multistory Top Level" to Level X, and Revit will repeat the exact same stair for each intermediate floor. If there are different floor to floor heights, you will have to do it on a per-level basis.
ReplyDeleteNow, as far as landings go, you can't quite do a "closed-loop" stair, but landings at floor levels are generally the slab construction, not the stair stringer / landing construction, so no issue there. However, your railings will by default only continue directly above your stringers, so you will manually have to extend them to close the loop... sort of. Railings also suffer from the fact that they can't quite be "closed" but you can extend the end points of the sketch lines to be something like 1/4" apart and it will look very much like the railing is continuous. (If you really want a continuous railing, try copying it to the clipboard, editing it to be, say, 1/2 of the total run, pasting the original railing back, and then editing the pasted one to be the 2nd 1/2 of the run... this method also works very well for doing the disconnected runs on the outer edge of a stair)
[I got lots more Revit tricks up my sleeve if you need them...]
-Dan
Hi,
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I'm having the same exact problem. Has the situation changed at all in the last year. I'm using 2012.