Tim over at the RevitCat has put together a nice writeup on component stairs, and specifically, landings. Some of you may have struggled to place a landing at the top of a stair flight – particularly when dealing with multistorey stairs. Along with other tips, Tim shows you how…
Here is the key to the workaround: Place an extra run at the top so that Revit creates an automatic landing; then delete that run – the landing will remain, but will be converted to a sketch based component
To be quite honest, I haven’t really used the new 2013 features for Railings, perhaps because my recent work has been more on a master planning level rather than construction documentation. In any case, there are plenty of resources out there to get you started.
Here is a quick crash course – in the Type Properties for Railings in Revit 2013, you will see new options for ‘Top Rail’, ‘Handrail 1’ and ‘Handrail 2’. You can set the Type and Height of these.
To make new Types, go to the Project Browser under Families -> Railings and you will see nodes for Handrail Type and Top Rail Type. Duplicate and edit the type definitions you see here to make new 2013 ‘continuous’ railing types.
Once you have applied a Top Rail Type to a Railing Type definition, you can now Tab to select the Top Rail! It is basically separating the Top Rail out as a component so that you can perform advanced edits to it. From here, you can access the real awesomeness of Revit 2013 Railings – a sketch mode to extend and adjust the Railing …
Click Edit Rail and you are in business. It will look something like this:
So, if you haven’t used this feature in the past 7 months, hopefully this post will help you get started with it.
I also found the audio interview linked below quite insightful. It describes the reason railings are undergoing upgrade, including the requirement of railing extensions for accessibility. For me, this has probably caused the most pain with regard to railings in pre-2013 versions.
Also, this interview gives the following ‘insight’ into Revit 2014 and future versions: Railing features would be upgraded over several Revit releases
Railings: Hear Jean Foster, Senior Interaction Designer, speak about railing enhancements. Jean describes how the top rail and hand rail elements have been changed to better accommodate continuous conditions. She explains how additional controls allow you to add extensions and different types of extensions to a railing, and how making components within the railing system makes the system more flexible as a whole.
There is plenty of information available about Component Stairs in Revit 2013. I thought I would collect some of the better resources and post them here.
I spotted this cool graphic a while ago on Revitez, but it was in French. Ben Malone has gone to the trouble of translating it into English for us – thanks mate!
Pre-2013 sketch based stairs have the Stair Path bound to the actual Stair element. In Revit 2013 when using Component Stairs, the Stair Path becomes a separate element. Think of it as a special Tag for Stairs. The Stair Path tool is located on the Annotate ribbon:
You can safely delete the path from views where you don’t want to see it. It seems that these are automatically created in certain Plan views – I’m unsure what the ‘rule’ governing the automatic creation of Stair Paths is, yet.
The Stair Path is a System Family. You can Duplicate existing Path types to create and customize the Stair Path to your liking:
Also, the Categories related to Stair UP and DOWN text have all been moved to the Annotation Categories in Visibility / Graphics! You won’t find them under Model – Stairs anymore:
Awesome post to Wikihelp by Ping Jiang, Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Autodesk.
The short version: basically when the old stairs upgrade to Revit 2013 and mix with new stairs in the project, we just need to simply uncheck the visibility of ‘above’Riser Lines and Riser Lines, then the representation for them will be almost exactly the same [as pre-2013] in all the views.
