From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Adding stairs - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Adding stairs

- [Instructor] In this video we're going to add a stair to our Revit project. Now to get started I want to actually have two views open. So I've got my level one floor plan view open but it turns out that when you're working in stairs you can actually work on it simultaneously in 2D and in 3D so it'll be helpful to have a 3D view as well. So here under 3D views, I have a second view called 3D stair and then what I'm going to do is go to the view tab and click on the tile button here on the windows panel or you can type W T which is the keyboard shortcut and I'll just use my wheel to adjust the pan and zoom of both views to kind of get things positioned. So now I'm going to click the architecture tab and click the stair tool here in the circulation panel. That'll take me to a kind of sketch mode but this sketch mode is a little bit different because instead of sketching with lines, we're going to be sketching with components. So if you look at the component panel here, there are three component choices. Run, landing and support. Now even though it's possible to draw landings and supports separately, most of the time all you'll ever need is the run tool because it will simultaneously create support and as long as this box is checked right here, it will also automatically create landings. So a lot of times that's all you need is the run tool. Now you can draw a straight stairs, a spiral stairs or even winder L shape and U shape stairs but we're going to stick with the straight stair for this example here. So now let's direct our attention to the properties palette. Now there are three different families to choose from assembled stair, cast in place or pre cast and each of those has some types. I'm going to stick with the assembled stair and the default type of 190 millimeter max riser with a 250 millimeter tread. Now you could certainly choose one of the others if you wish. The way this works is there's a base level and a top level. So we're going from level one to level two. So that establishes the total height of the stair. These numbers here in the name are coming from the edit type dialog. So there's a maximum riser height of 190 and a minimum tread depth if 250. So I'm going to cancel out of there. What Revit does is it takes that maximum riser height and it divides it into the total height of the stair and it came up with a desired number of risers of 16. And this is the fewest number of risers that we can have without going over 190. You can see here that the actual riser height is currently 187.5. If I change the number of riser to 15 and try to apply that, that kicks the actual riser height up to 200 which exceeds the rule and I'll get this error message. I'm going to click cancel. On the other hand, if you want more risers, that can easily be accommodated because that lowers the actual riser height which is well within the required range now we can also increase the desired tread depth, it's just if you tried to make it smaller that you'd get an error. So here, we're going to increase to 275 and that will be accepted without error. So I've got 18 risers, 275 for the tread. I'm going from level one to level two an automatic landing and right here is where you set the actual width of each run and I'm going to accept the default of 12. Now right here we've got five choices for location line. Run center is fairly self explanatory. I can click a point and it would start drawing right down the middle of the run. You also have left and right options and if we zoom in a little bit here, you can see that that's left or right of the run itself so it's kind of like inside of the support line. If you do exterior support left or right then it goes to the outside edge of the support. So you could really choose any one of those options that you like. Now what I'm going to do is zoom back out a little bit here and I want to direct your attention to the gray message below the run that I'm drawing. As I move my mouse, it's going to change the quantity of risers created and the quantity that are remaining. So what I want to do is get it to nine and nine. And that's what I'm going to click. Now when I do that, it will display the run that I've just created in both the plan view and in 3D. Now, you might need to zoom in a little bit here to see these numbers but notice that there's a number at each end of the run. Number one on the left, number nine on the right. Those are the riser numbers. So we're starting with riser one here and going up to riser nine there. So let's create another run. I want to line up with the first run and then I'm going to give myself plenty of room and then click the start point of this new run. When I start to move in the opposite direction, the message will tell me how many risers are created and how many remaining again but notice that it's ghosting in a new run and it's creating a landing. So this time, I want to go and create all the remaining risers. So I want to do nine created, zero remaining and then I will click. And you'll see that we're going from riser 10 now to 18 and then you'll simultaneously see over in the 3D view all of the components have been created. Now these are separate components. So these are runs, these are supports and this is the landing. All of these components work together. They're all kind of interconnected with one another. So what's really interesting about working with these stair components is as you begin to make adjustments the other components will adjust as well. For example, I did not indicate how far apart I wanted these two runs, I sort of eyeballed it. Now when I select one of the runs, it does give me some temporary dimensions but it doesn't give me any that relate back to the other run. So what I want to do is set the distance between those two runs. So I'm actually going to do that but just drawing a dimension. So I'm going to go to my quick access toolbar, click the align dimension tool or you can type D I and I'm going to highlight this inside edge right here. Now I want you to pay attention to the tool tip that appears because you want to make sure that says runs before you click. I'm going to highlight the inside edge on the opposite one and it also says runs but if it says supports you want to press your tab key until it says runs and then I'll click again and place the dimension. I'll cancel out of the dimension command with the modify tool and now when I select one of the runs, that will activate the dimension. So now, I can click in here and type in the value I want and I'm going to put in 200. Now when I do that, that will actually shorten this little small support here. It'll adjust the size of the landing and of course, move the two runs closer together. So that's a really simple example of how all these components are connected and coordinated with one another. Now let's see the final result of the stair but before we do, notice that over here on the far side of the ribbon, you have a railing button. So it's always a good idea to check this first because when you create a stair, it'll automatically create a railing as well. So it's a good idea to know what it's going to give you. Now, it's possible to turn that off, set it to none if you wanted to. But I'm going to leave it turned on and accept the default 900 millimeter pipe here. You can put it on the treads or you can put it on the stringer. I want it on the stringer and then I'll click okay. And then I'm going to click finish to see the result of the stair. Now you'll see the stair appear here in both 3D and in 2D and we are getting a little warning message here about the rail not being continuous. Now notice that it's highlighting the inside rail for this message. So I'm going to click up here on the title bar of the 3D view, zoom in right here where the railing come together and you can kind of see the way the corners are a little bit too sharp in the sort of shearing off. That's what the message is referring to. Now this is one of those yellow tinted messages here and I can click anywhere and it will just go away. So we can easily ignore that message and if you're not bothered by this rail juncture, you could ignore that condition completely and it won't affect anything. But let's say that you wanted to fix that. You wanted to adjust that. Well one way you that you could adjust that is just you just simply give that railing a little bit more room to turn the corner. So what I'm going to do is click over here in the plan view, select the stair again and choose edit stairs. Once I do that, remember that all of these components are connected to one another. So if I select the landing and begin modifying it, that'll have an impact on the other connected pieces. Now notice that the landing has all of these grip controls on the various sides. What I'm going to do is take this one right here next to the top run and begin dragging it to the left. So I'm going to click hold down and start to drag. But I'm not going to let go yet. It's snapping to a lot of numbers but not the number I want. I want it to snap to 300. Notice that the dimension is bold. That means, you can just start typing. And that's called a listening dimension and it will receive the typed input and when you press enter, I've just added a 300 millimeter extension to the landing at the top there. Now I'm going to repeat the process at the bottom, start dragging to the left again, once again, it's not snapping to the value I want. I want 450 so I'll just type it in, press enter and I've now added the extension I want on the bottom portion of the landing. When I click finish, now the railing has plenty of room to turn the corner and the error message goes away. So that's another really simple example of how all these components are interconnected with one another including the railings. Now let's look at one more example. I'm going to select the stair here, edit the stairs and we've gone one through nine here and we've got 10 through 18 here. It turns out that you can actually redistribute the risers across either of the runs in a variety of ways. So, what I'm going to do is make sure I can see things in both 2D and in 3D, I'm going to select this top run here and at the end of the run, we have a small little dot grip and we have a small little triangle grip. Now the dot actually adds or removes risers without affecting the rest of the stair. So notice that when I drag that to the right, it actually removed several of the risers and in fact, this now says that it starts at riser five. Okay so I'm going to zoom back out, undo to get that back again. Let me select it again and show you the triangle grip which I think is way more interesting. So let's take this little triangle grip and I'm going to drag a little bit to the right and notice that as I remove risers from that run they get added back to the other run. So we're still ending at 18, it's just redistributing them. Or I could drag the other way like so, and it does the opposite so it's adding them on to this run and removing them from the other. Now I'm just going to take it and snap one more here and leave it like so. So let's finish this and you can now see that the result of that also adjusted where the height of the landing is. So again, all the pieces are connected together. Now, if you take a look here in 3D, we have our floor from the second floor right there and that's kind of coming in over here. So the trouble is, if we're walking into the stair here and wrapping around, we're going to exit the stair in the wrong spot. So it turns out that's real easy to fix. You can just select the stair and with this little control right here, you can flip it's direction. So now we're entering the stair on this side and wrapping around that way and that actually reversed the two runs and had the effect of lowering the landing. Now the final step is to move the stair into position where we need it to go. Now in order to do that, I kind of need to see the geometry of the second floor. So, here in the first floor plan, I will make sure that I don't have anything selected and that will display the properties of the first floor plan here on the properties palette. I'll scroll down, and in the underlay feature, it's currently set to none but I'm going to change that to level two and look up and when I do that it will ghost in the level two above and now I can very easily select the stair, go to my move command, snap right to that end point and then move the stair and snap it to this end point here. Now, if you're unable to move along a diagonal, make sure you uncheck constrain right here with your move command. Otherwise, it would only go horizontal and vertical. So I could now move that right in to position in that location and that completes the creation of our stair. So as you can see these component based stairs are very powerful because all of the parts and pieces are connected together and allows you to try many variations of the stair and experiment with different configurations before you settle in on your final solution.

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