Slab with drop and column head

Welcome back to Revit-IT! I am sure everyone is looking forward for the coming Season's holiday.

As usual, today's article is about a model I encountered in our office. It's about a slab with drop panel and column head. One of my co-workers modeled this structure using "model in-place". No doubt, using this method had some issues. One of the issues I noticed is that the column head and the drop panel is not an integrated part of the column. So when the floor level height change, you have to move every column head and shortened the column which is really a tedious job to do.

You are better off when you build this structure using a structural column family. With this method, you are more flexible instead of modeling in place. You can reuse the family in other project thereby your office will be more efficient. It took me some hours to develop these two family types for this project. Moral lesson here, as a Cad Manager you must have an overview what your modelers are doing and not allow them to just having their way with modeling.

Merry Christmas to everyone and wishing you all the very best for the coming New Year 2011.