Concrete Panel

How would you like to model your concrete panels for your project? This is often a question found elsewhere. You need it to be a wall. For a rough representation, use wall reveals for showing panel joints. However, it might cause a headache when wanting the panels as separate pieces.

For performance issues, I would not recommend using in-place families. There's a lot of overhead to the model in terms of size.

Lastly, I will still advocate using a column family to represent concrete panels if there is a need for shop drawings. You are more flexible in using it, like placing it on a slanted position, do the shape whatever you want. Any other suggestions out there?

Simplified Export to DWF

There are times that your project needs various paper sizes for sheet hardcopy. It is sometimes very annoying when you have to choose a print setting to use.

To simplify this procedure, I advise you to use the following “Print Setup” as shown below when to need to do a DWF Export with various paper sizes.

You simply choose from the drop box Name: <in-session> and for the Paper Size: <Use Sheet Size>. Once you have done with these settings, you will be able to export to “dwf” using any paper size. You do not need to open this Print Setup dialog box to set the print to A0, A1 or whatever you need for your hardcopy.

Let this tip work for you from now on.

Floor Spot Elevation Problem

This seems to be a common problem when you issue Annotate>Spot Elevation and the top face of the floor you want to annotate cannot be detected and a symbol shows up, like a screw head. The Spot Elevation can only locate the edge of the floor as shown below and not somewhere on the floor surface.

If your Visual Style is set to “Wireframe”, Revit cannot locate the floor top face and that is why a screw head symbol shows up. To fix it, always set your Visual Style to “Hidden” and not to “Wireframe” in order that you will get your Spot Elevation Annotation correctly on the middle of the floor.

    

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.