Parking Stall Family Placed on Tapered Slab

[rmcelvain.103137]

Hi all,

I work in a structural engineering office and we are currently modeling a small 5 story parking ramp. I am trying to use the parking stalls that come with revit but have run into a problem with display.

The floor slabs are tapered for drainage. In doing this it causes the parking stalls to "dive" into the floor where the slope edges meet. Is there a better approach to modeling the stalls so that I can still schedule the number of available parking spaces?

I'm including an image to better explain what is going on ....

Thanks!

[cliff collins]

Short answer: No.

Long answer--you can try to "reset the Host" of the stall onto the sloped floor/slab.

You can actually "paint" individual stripes onto the slab, with individual separate
"floors" which are only the stripe, and then group/array them. Very tedious, and not a good solution--but it can be done.

You might also take a look here:

http://www.eaglepoint.com/solutions/workflow/office/landscape/landcaddforrevit.asp?id=lc4raugi#Top

This plug-in can do what you are asking, along with other site tools.

cheers

[Overconstrained]

You can offset them from the slab slightly too. Often only a few mm is needed to make them display properly.

[jeffh]

You can offset them from the slab slightly too. Often only a few mm is needed to make them display properly.

This was going to be my suggestion.

[kmarquis]

I had to do this a few years ago and I made the parking spots face hosted so they were angled on the ramp. It was easy. Just make sure you pay attention to what level they're scheduling at.

[cliff collins]

You can offset them from the slab slightly too. Often only a few mm is needed to make them display properly.

Yes--but then when you render it, strange shadows appear underneath the stripes!

Jeff, The Factory REALLY needs to fix this--it's not been touched for many releases.
We really should not need to buy a plus $1000 plug-in for Revit's lack of good site tools!

Hope this made it into the Wishlist voting cycle very near the top of the list!

cheers

[saeborne]

Here's what we do... But our goals may be different.

We want our parking plans to look good in plan, but we really don't care about the rendering aspects of it. We rarely, if ever, spend time to render the interior of a parking garage. If you do large suburban parking lots and need rendered site plans, then I can see why you would need the spots to render.

We make each parking family out of a parking family, composed of essentially model lines. We make the each space a family, not the striping.

My clients don't care how many stripes I have, yet they always seem to be critically concerned with how many parking spaces are in the project.

Then, I insert an "Invisible Antenna" family into my parking space family. This invis antenna pokes up above a sloping floor, and thus it always looks right in plan.

There may be better ways of doing this. Would love to hear other examples of solutions.

[Overconstrained]

I had to do this a few years ago and I made the parking spots face hosted so they were angled on the ramp. It was easy. Just make sure you pay attention to what level they're scheduling at.

This is a really good method for a constant slope slab.

[j_starko]

on a past project we also created a custom sloped parking family. I ran out of time but was trying to make an Instance paramter called "slope" work.

we had consistant slopes for only about 5-8 stalls at a time, so making multiple famlies for each slope was tedious.

[Overconstrained]

on a past project we also created a custom sloped parking family. I ran out of time but was trying to make an Instance paramter called "slope" work.

we had consistant slopes for only about 5-8 stalls at a time, so making multiple famlies for each slope was tedious.

You don't need multiple families, just one "face-based" parking stall family will do the job.

[rmcelvain.103137]

... our goals may be different .....

Sounds like our goals are pretty much the same :p .... I like this approach, simple, and to the point.

Thanks everyone for the advice, I will be checking out LandCadd. If they can get the strip to act like paint on a surface then Autodesk should be able to....

[saeborne]

You don't need multiple families, just one "face-based" parking stall family will do the job.

I tried this method once. The face based parking spaces don't behave exactly as I would expect. For example, let's imaging I have a 10% slope, and I put face based parking families on it.

For one thing, I couldn't select multiple parking objects and rotate them. Revit wouldn't let me.

But more importantly, I may have a different portion of floor that transitions from 10% to 5%. This is a different floor object, and thus I would have to reconcile the hosting, or delete and create new. I found it to be difficult. YMMV.

[Alfredo Medina]

The parking stall family that comes with Revit does the job well. All you need is to set the face of the slanted slab as the new host for the grouped array of parking spots.

[doug.wood]

I am having a similar problem, however I want to place the parking stalls on a Toposurface. Our civil dept did the design for the drainage of the parking lots and provided me with the contours for the site. The toposurface was created from these contours. Because this surface has multiple slopes the stall will be hosted at one end on the face of the surface but not at the other. So it will either be "hosted" in space at some funny angle or will be within the surface itself and won't show in plans or 3D. See attached images.

[rmcelvain.103137]

I am having a similar problem, however I want to place the parking stalls on a Toposurface. Our civil dept did the design for the drainage of the parking lots and provided me with the contours for the site. The toposurface was created from these contours. Because this surface has multiple slopes the stall will be hosted at one end on the face of the surface but not at the other. So it will either be "hosted" in space at some funny angle or will be within the surface itself and won't show in plans or 3D. See attached images.

Unfortunately, it looks like you are correct in your assessment .... I'll update this if I figure out anything.

[cliff collins]

The LandCadd for Revit plug-in looks like the only available solution for this.

Have not actually tested it on a multi-sloped toposurface.

Again, the Factory really needs to address this, as it has been an issue for
many years, and NO progress has been made with better Site Tools.

Try creating a curb which follows the contours of you drives on a sloped toposurface......

cheers

[thalim]

I have a slightly different problem here. What about if a portion of parking stall placed on a sloped ramp and flat slab? The parking stall will be hosted on the sloped ramp and looks OK on plan; however, when you cut section thru it, the portion of parking stall that was not hosted in sloped ramp is sticking out on the flat slab.
Mahalo

[cliff collins]

Use 2 different stripes, one flat and one sloped. ( I always love parking my Porsche on unevenly slope spaces like that......)

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Tobin,
I know this may sound incredibly obvious but can't you just turn the stalls off in your sections? Do you really see any value in parking stripes being visible in any view but a plan?

[irneb]

Another "silly" question: Why do you need to "model" the paint stripe? Can't a parking bay be drawn as a detail component / even just detail lines / filled regions? My point is: When do you want to see the parking bay? The only time I can think of when you might want to model the paint, would be for renderings.

[kmarquis]

From someone who has done parking garages before the parking stripe needs to be a quantifiable family and filled regions, detail components and detail lines are not. There is huge value in it being a 3D object...even being able to see it in a 3D view is valuable for planning. But I think turning it off in section is good enough. Also...I think there's a bit of truth in the joke that Cliff Collins made. Are you sure you want to have a car park half straight and half sloped?

[irneb]

What I was referring to is to add a detail component into the parking family. That way it appears properly in plan even if you have these "strange" sloping floors under it.

And yes, I've got many a parking going over a slight change in slope. It's normal for nearly every parking bay at the corners of parking lots, usually on suspended RC slabs you'd have slopes to floor drains to allow for storm-water. The slopes are minuscule (usually around 1:60 to 1:100), just in order to have water run towards the drains instead of pooling under the cars.

It would have been awesome to have a hosted parking family which "projects" its paint onto the floor. Thus "kinking" the paint across these changes in slopes (as they would have been made physically). But that's probably for a wish item to the "Hard of hearing genie".

[kmarquis]

I didn't meant to offend you and it's been years since I've done parking plans. It was a parking garage I was working on with higher sloped ramps so I just remember replanning to shift the spots off the angles.

You could possible make a parking spot and build in an angle as an instance parameter so it bends like you want it to. Good luck.

[irneb]

No offence taken. Just wanted to clarify that I meant detail-lines / filled-regions / detail components inside the parking family instead of simply drawing them in the project. I'm in full agreement that you should use a parking family placed in the project, scheduling and modification is simply a lot better when you do that.

As for the bending on an instance angle, I think that might make life more difficult (the kink line is generally anywhere - i.e. you'd need 1000's of versions to get only most possibilities). At present I'm doing a work-around by making the "lines" a slight thickness so it accommodates these slight changes in slope for 3d view. But then I turn off their visibility in plan/section/elevation, and have a set of detail lines in plan view only. It's not perfect, but at least it works.

Edit: The only issue is that a parking family cannot contain a filled region. It can contain a masking region, which makes no sense to me. Though the work-around is to make a detail component and then nest that into the parking family.

Edit2: Attached sample parking component as per my suggested work-around. 2013 format though, sorry.