Railings - stairs

[steven-g]

More and more we are getting models that come from Revit or Archicad(IFC) and my job is to get quantities from these, I admit that my skills with Revit are sparse but I can find my way around in a model. I have been asked to schedule the staircase railings and hand rails in a project, these are not modelled. So trying to add these in using Revit I tried adding railings to host, but for some reason the stairs although showing as being a stair under properties are not recognised using the add railings tool, I also have no idea how to add railings using the sketch feature. Drawing lines only works (for me) if you first set a working plane and these stairs have no selectable points I can find to draw along the strings, they also have no lines selectable to select existing geometry, and besides that there are over a hundred staircases and not many are either the same size or even the same orientation. After wasting half a day watching videos and trying various things, I have exported the stairs, walls and floors to DWG and I'm doing this in Autocad, which is so easy using 3dpoly. Is it really so complicted and time consuming in Revit do I have to set a workplane for every twist and turn, or am I missing some simple tricks, all I need eventually are linear measurements and in Autocad it's just a question of pick pick pick done. But it would be nice to have that in Revit so that my collegues can check it using solibri.

Attached is one of the stairs just in case I'm doing something wrong with the railings by host option.

Stair.rvt

[tzframpton]

Stairs are a beating for me. I've never had a reason to dive too deep into them but I do know my way around the Stair tool, but only enough to get me in trouble lol. 

 

Hop over to www.revitforum.org and copy/paste this post. There are some stair gurus over there that will definitely be able to assist. 

 

-TZ

[marmo]

Sorry for your late reply, you probably will have already finished the job ...
Anyway it's an interesting post and I want to give my solution.
The approach is this:
The railings can be hosted by stairs, floors, ramps and toposurface.
So it could be done this way, using toposurfaces.
1) export to autocad.
2) draw some lines you'll use to generate the 2 toposurfaces (on 2 separated layers, blue and red in the pictures).

3) import in Revit and generate the 2 different toposurfaces. 
3) draw the parapet.
4) indicate the two toposurfaces as the new host.

5) hide the toposurf.
It remains however a cumbersome solution, but allows you to have the railings in revit.

[tzframpton]

My apologies in advance, but I would fervently disagree with exporting/importing to and from AutoCAD. At worst case, just manually place the same lines/reference planes in Revit and just model the railings manually. 

 

Some things don't need to be "auto-magic" and to get things done, do it the manual way first and continue learning the "auto-magic" way. 

 

-TZ

[marmo]

This was not a question of the philosophy of setting up a project in Revit. In this case there is a very specific and not so general problem. The geometry of the imported staircase is partly corrupted. The stringer of the scale does not allow the snap, unlike the steps. It is not a question of setting up a working practice, but of solving a very specific issue with elements that have already been imported but are in fact unusable. I am intrigued by the solutions with reference lines. How can it be done?

Edited October 23, 2018 by marmo

[tzframpton]

Well, now that I've read your last post I got curious and went to look at the Revit model. Now I see the issue... this isn't a native Revit Stair to begin with. Looks like imported DWG which is the obvious ready why Hosting a rail doesn't work. 

 

I guess I'm going to be hands off on this discussion. This entire approach is nothing but pure unadulterated workarounds so because of that I'll pull all previous comments. Please continue...

 

-TZ

Edited October 23, 2018 by tzframpton

[marmo]

Also I do not agree with many of the forcing that revit allows. In this case the problem lies in the fact that the conversion in IFC format is still very backward today.

[steven-g]

I did export to Autocad and drew everything there. The drawings were produced in Archicad and received in IFC format. And unfortunately, my knowledge of Revit is sadly lacking and I still cannot figure out how to even produce just simple linework within the created Revit model when there is no way to select points on the stringers to set a workplane, and even if you could select points it looks like you would have to create a new workplane for every single short section of hand rail, which just seems to me to be so counter productive. I really want to learn how to do this in Revit it has to be simpler than that but all my searching has found nothing.

[marmo]

You can do this by loading the stair into the conceptual mass environment. It's better for the kind of job you want to do.

For the parapet you can create a family based on adaptive points that can reports the parameters of the perimeter, area and some lengths ...

So:

1) new conceptual mass family (you have 3d snap option, reference lines etc)

2) import the stair ---> i suggest to import a cad file where the stringers are fixed, it's enough to draw some lines on the existing geometry to allow the snap when you import the file. 

3) built a separate family for the parapet based on 3 adaptive points with parameters where you can set, height, materials etc, and some reporting parameters for area and dimensions.

4) otherwise you can draw directly in the family where you imported the dwg of the stair, like in the image below.

[tzframpton]

Good tip on the Mass Environment marmo. That's the type of manual process I had in mind in my original comments. 

 

-TZ

[marmo]

You are right. I could think of it first!