From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Adding stairs - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Adding stairs

Now you could work exclusively in a floor plan view like I have here but what I want to do is actually open up a 3-D view and tile them side by side as I work. So I'm going to locate this view called 3-D stair here. Double click to open it. You can see that that's a cut away of my lobby. Then I'll go the view tab and click tile views And then using the wheel on the mouse I'll pan and zoom to focus in on the space where we're placing the stair on both sides of the screen. Now I do want the floor plan to be active so make sure you click somewhere here in the floor plan and then go back to architecture and we'll click on the stair tool here on the circulation panel. So once we click the tool, that puts us in stair creation mode and let me point out a few of the settings that we want to look at here. So on the properties pallet, we've got some families that we can choose from. Assembled stair, cast and place, and precast. Now you're welcome to try all of those but I'm going to stick with the default one here, the 190 by 250. Now what I want to do is show you what that means. So right beneath the type selector here, there's an edit type button. I'll click that and the 190 is the maximum riser hight, okay, so that number right there. And then the minimum tread depth. So what this means is the stair will generate a warning if we create a tread depth smaller than 250 or a riser hight that's larger than 190. So that will set the slope of the stair for us within an acceptable range. So I'm not going to change either of those numbers, I'll simply click okay. And then let's move down a little further here and understand how Revit uses those numbers. So there's a base level and a top level for every stair. Now these are set to levels in your project so currently it's going from level one to level two, which is logical cause I want to get from this floor up to this floor. Now the hight between those levels is calculated for you right here as a read-only property of 3000 millimeters. So that's the distance between level one and level two. You get to say how many risers you'd like to have with the desired number of risers and it divides 3000 by that and come up with an actual riser hight of 187.5. Now it tries to find the highest riser that it can without exceeding the value in the type properties that we just looked at and that's where 16 came from. So with 16 risers, we get as close as possible at 187.5. Now if you put in a number smaller than 16, that makes that actual riser hight a little too tall and if I try to apply that, I would get a warning that tells me that I've exceeded the limits. If I put a number larger than 16, like 18 for example, that generates a riser hight within the range and there is no warning. Likewise, the tread depth would work the same way. If you put a smaller number in, it would generate a warning. But if you put a larger number in, it will not complain. So I'm going to put in 275 here and 18 for the desired number of risers. Now I'm going to accept all the rest of the defaults but let me just point out a few things that you might want to pay attention to. There is some location line options here. So I'm going to accept the default one of support left but if you want you can experiment with some of the others. I'm not going to off set, but you could do that. I'm not going to change the actual run width, I'm going to use 12000. This type allows for a minimum of 1000 so you could go to a smaller number, if you wanted to, or even a larger number. And then automatic landing is really handy and we'll see the affect of that in just a moment. Now over here we're drawing runs and you could draw either in straight or spiral or L or U shaped but we're going to stick with the straight run. And I'll just kind of find a point here in the middle of the lobby, click, and start moving to the right. Now there's a small message in gray beneath the stair that you're about to create and it says how many risers you've created and how many are left. Also you'll notice that I'm drawing from the top edge in this case, which is the support left, so once again if you want you could experiment with those location lines. Move your mouse so that it says nine and nine. And when you see nine created, nine remaining, click and that will create the first component, the first run in this case. And you'll see it up here, both in 2-D and in 3-D. Now what I'm going to do is line up with the end of that run there, give myself plenty of room, click, and go back in the other direction, all the way past the end where it says nine created, zero remaining. And notice also that a landing will ghost in. That's the consequence of having automatic landing turned on. So all I need to do is click again and, not only do I get another run, but now I also get the landing. Now I'm going to zoom in on what we've created here and show you some really small numbers at the points that we clicked. This was riser one, then we clicked our second point, that became riser nine. Then we've got 10 here and 18 here. So those are just further confirmations of the locations that you specified on screen. Now I want to manipulate the distance between these two runs and set it numerically because, as you can see, I just sort of eyeballed it in there. Now you could certainly select any of these components, notice that the runs are separate from the supports, which are also separate from the landings. But generally speaking, the runs will drive the other components, so if you just simply manipulate the position of the runs, the other things usually take care of themselves. Now I could use a move command here but I don't really know how far to move it so what I'm going to do instead is use a dimension. So I'll come up here to my dimension tool or type D + I. I'm going to highlight the inside face and I want to make sure it says runs on my tool tip, either on screen or down in the status bar at the lower left hand corner. If it doesn't say runs, press your Tab key until it does. And likewise here, if it doesn't say runs, use your Tab key to make sure, and then place this dimensions. I'll click the modify tool to cancel out. Now I'll select one of the runs and, because I made sure this dimension was attached to the two runs, it will activate and then I can type in a number, like 200, and press enter. So notice when that run moves it takes the supports with it and it reshapes the size of the landing. So now I'll just click away from that to deselect. Now there's one more thing I want to point out to you before we finish this. Over on the far right, there's a railing button. If you click that, there's a few things you can do here. You can choose a railing type, I'm going to accept the default of 900 millimeter pipe. If you don't want a railing, you can set it to none. So by default, it's going to give you a railing on both sides of the stairs so I'll stick with the default there. But what I do want to change is the position of this railing. So it defaults to treads, I'm going to change that to stringer and then click okay. So now I'll click the finish edit model button here and you'll see the completed stair and the railings appear in both the floor plan and in the 3-D. Now, the inner railing is highlighting in orange and there is a warning being generated. But this is one of those yellow tinted ignorable warnings. Now what it's saying is that the rail is not continuous and that there may be some breaks in there that are undesirable. Let me click over here to the 3-D view, zoom in by rolling the wheel. You can sort of see what the problem is. Notice that some of these turns are a little tight and they're kinked in a little bit of an unnatural way. Now it's hardly noticeable so you could easily just click anywhere and dismiss that warning. Now if you do want to modify that, it is possible to do that. But for now we're just going to ignore it. Now what I encourage you to do is to maybe create a couple additional stairs just to get comfortable with the tool. Maybe try a straight run stair, where you use all the risers in a single run. Or maybe to a muli-run stair, where you click multiple points. Just remember that each two points you click will specify a run and it will automatically connect the two runs together with a landing. So you always want to kind of leave enough room for the landing as you go. But go ahead and practice with that a little bit But go ahead and practice with that a little bit before you continue on. before you continue on.

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