Residential Framing Options

[jason.95606]

What is the general way that the Revit Community is doing framing plans for residential projects?

There are three options that I can come up with:

1. You use the structural beams to add your 2x framing for floor joists and roof joists. This has caused me problems because I want to underlay the floor plan to see the walls halftone and the framing of the floor above shows up.

2. You just do it in drafting linework... unfortunate that you are loosing a lot of the things that are great with Revit but it gets the job done and you can more easily control view settings, lineweights, and you don't need to mess with reference planes.

3. You make your own 2x members out of Generic Floor or Roof families.

I am torn on which way would be best....

Does anyone have good solutions or input?

[archjake]

I have had success with the first two options you mention. If you want to use the floor plan as an underlay and not see the framing members in a view just turn off the visibility for that type of family for the view.

Option 2 is quick and efficient for some projects. And why not do it this way. Your structural engineer would do it this way anyways.

I've never had to make a generic family to represent structure, but this is another way to control visibility as you could have another sub-category to turn off... but why not just do that for your structural families?

[ejburrell67787]

1. You use the structural beams to add your 2x framing for floor joists and roof joists. This has caused me problems because I want to underlay the floor plan to see the walls halftone and the framing of the floor above shows up.
When you make your framing plan (eg by duplicating a floor plan) set the graphic override for that view only to have walls as grey. Should give the effect you want.

Have you been using beam systems for your joists etc? They are very good as you can choose an area to fill with beams and then the design changes you can adjust the beam area and the joists will update to suit.

[BillyGrey]

For residential framing plans, I usually take the option 2 route, but I also use in-place family or
system family beams where appropriate. Typically, I am free to create views as necessary this way. For sections, a minute or two of linework or filled regions for roof struct. and it's done.

When warranted, I'll crank up my modeling to include floor/roof joists, but I also use worksets on many of my projects, so visibility control is not an issue with these instances. I use arrayed in place families allot for floor/roof joists. Also, arraying grouped linework (opt. 1) smokes to because if a wall line moves, edit one line in the grouped array, and they all update. As a solo practitioner, this works great.

On rare projects, where a high degree of resolution/verification is a good thing, and the budget warrants, I'll model the whole enchilada.

I think it boils down to your individual/project requirements, coordination requirements, etc. vs.
productivity goals. Stay flexible you will be ready for anything.

[3dway]

I just want to revive this topic. I did a search first instead of posting new. I'm trying to improve my forum use habits and build a good topic which may eventually get sticky.

I'm interested in how to represent structure as well. We would like to be able to identify conflicts, and show point loads transferred down from above. We rolled around the idea of trying to model jacks and kings into the sides of window families and lintels above so that they change with the window size. Is this possible?

In short we want to see point loads from above as they change with girder locations and window sizes and identify conflicts.

Also, would it be reasonable to model the floors as just the subfloor so that you could model flush beams within the floor thickness and get no conflict errors? Joists would be arrayed 2d objects in the section view or I suppose, why not a beam system?

I guess I'm posing the thread author's question again, but in light of the 2009 release of the software.