Parking Garages / Best workflow

[rtaube]

I was wonderinf if someone could share some of their experiences and best practices when dealing with parking garages. Predominantly with sloping floors/beams, ramps, etc. More specifically, do apply slopes to your floors/ramps, to you adjust the points. Do you model your ramps as ramps? or just sloped floors. If you are setting elevations to vertexes on the floor, how do you deal with the intermediate ones that should fall on the plane. Were there any things that you didn't expect when you first started working on them. What's been the most frustrating part and how did you get around it?

Thanks for any insight.

[wbi]

Hey Taube!
I don't have a lot a experience with parking garages since moving into the Revit era, however I have some comments about floors, beams, sloping in general. In the long run of a project I've found that using slope arrows for your floors is the simplest route if you can get away with it. You can be real specific with the top and bottom points that you're trying to hit and whenever you need to modify them it is really easy. The complete opposite of this simplicity would be adjusting points. That being said I've had some crazy sloping floors in garages I've done in CAD and they might not have worked with slope arrows alone (but I don't know for sure). Another solution I've used for very complicated sloping roofs is to model a bunch of separate roofs/floors and then joined them together to appear as one. Again, lots of work in the long run as updates to the design are needed but we pulled it off.

To go back on the keeping it simple idea, try to think about how they'll construct the garage too. Even though you may have some crazy slopes at floor level, the beams below are not going to be bent to reflect what's going on above. They'll either be flat or slope in one direction has been my experience. So, another thought that just came to mind would be to have a floor that mimics the beam slopes and is of constant thickness. And then if/where you are doing localized sloping you could make an in-place floor family for the additional thickness that would be added to the structural floor.

A bit of stream of thought here, but hopefully it helps narrow the strategy for you.

[damon.sidel]

I won't comment on all aspects that you'd like to know and wbi has mention some of them. The one thing I will say is that I would highly recommend NOT using ramps, but rather sloped floors. Ramps are not cut in plan!!! You'll find quite a few threads about that and unfortunately they just don't work for that. And I agree that using the slope arrow is preferable if possible. That said, there is one reason I've used ramps: they have nice built-in parameters for slopes and runs, etc. So you can use them to do some of the calculation for you. I build the ramp to get the critical spot elevations I need. Then I go back and model sloped floors to match.

Furthermore, if you have any curved, sloped areas, you'll find that floors are not your friend. I always build these with ramps at first. If they display correctly in plan and things like walls don't have to attach to them, great. If for any reason the ramp doesn't work with it's inherent limitations, I'll create a floor then modify it with the vertex options. That requires some linework cleanup in all applicable views, though, as it triangulates the floor. So use it only where necessary.