Display of Framing in Plan?

[jcoe]

I have made modifications to the structural framing members that come packaged with Revit so they appear in plan according to our structural department's standards. I made the changes and tested it and it seemed to work fine until someone started sloping their steel framing. For some reason the sloping steel is overriding the visibility settings I have set up in the family and I am unable to figure out why. Would anyone be willing to help try and troubleshoot this with me? I have been looking at if for hours.

The attached images should help illustrate what is going on.

In addition, how do you get the joists to slope with a beam. It seems that it would want to attach to the top of the beam flange and move as the beam slopes, but this is not the case. At each joist location, I have to type in the end level offset to get it to slope properly. Is there a better method?

[aaronrumple]

You want a coarse level of detail for the framing members - you should not have to edit the family's 3D display settings to achieve this. Maybe the symbolic line to show solid and dashed depending on what I'm seeing here.

[dbaldacchino]

Joe, I had this same issue and filed an SR with Autodesk a few months ago. It's by design (which I don't like). Any member that is tilted does not show it's symbolic representation, but it's three-dimensional one, even in plan views. So what Aaron's saying is the only way to make it work. There is some threshold that you need to reach before the object's representation becomes it's 3d rep. Try rotating a beam ever so slightly and you'll see that you hit a certain angle and the symbolic representation goes away.

In our case we were having problems with joists as they were sloping sideways at 1/4":1'-0". So we edited the families (I think we used medium detail) so that the 3d objects within the family are turned off and we used model lines as our symbolic representation (top chord only). This is a problem with all Revit objects. For instance a door, if placed on a wall with a slight tilt to an elevation view, will not show the symbolic representation of its elevation swing. I don't like that. I feel that certain views should show the symbology (such as framing plans) regardless of whether the element is rotated or not. I don't know what kind of coding issues this would present.

[jcoe]

David and Aaron,

Thank you for your responses. I am glad to hear that it is not something I did or can control. The structural department has been struggling with this for days. I'll have to tell them that it is what it is.

[erikbjur]

Maybe I didn't fully understand the problem but it was very easy to create the framing plan view he wanted with out having to modify any families. I just set the object style to what he wanted. Note that all of the beams are sloped, some are sloped and rotated, but they all show up correctly. Please correct me if I miss-understood. I hope this helps.

[dbaldacchino]

But that's because you set your view to coarse right? And the families are probably set to not show any 3D elements in coarse view, so what you're seeing is just one middle model line (looks like those are joists and it's using the double dash 3/8, correct?). If you had used symbolic lines, they wouldn't work.

[Scott D Davis]

in View/visibility, you can over-ride the display settings for structural items, and have them show "medium" even when the view is set to coarse.

[erikbjur]

He must want to show the framing plans in a medium detail setting. Unless there is some reason for this, I almost always use the course setting for all plan views. My framing plans look the same no matter what the angle of the beam is. I just noticed that Scott beat me to my second comment. The detail settings of each catagory can be independent for each view.

[jcoe]

The reason I need the symbolic linework to show up in all three detail levels is because our structural department likes to show the layers of the wall system in their framing plans.

Since we are on the subject of framing plans, what is the best method for showing door/ window openings below so we can place our lintels. I tried modifying the view range, but this does not seem to work. I thought about plan regions, but now I am chasing umpteen plan regions all over the model just to show a few lintels.

The course overrride under VG is a good find and something I did not notice before. I will give this a try.

Erik - are the dashed lines in your framing families symbolic or model?

Thanks again for all your feedback.

[dbaldacchino]

That was the reason for the solution I explained (making a model line show up in medium detail and turning off model geometry). We have the same issue so we decided on that detail level. We ended up doing some family modification but it wasn't too intense.

[jcoe]

After looking into this a little further, I think I misunderstood what Erik and Scott were getting at initially. I realized where my mistake was and got it worked out using the VG overrride as was suggested. I applied these visibility settings to my view template, so hopefully there will not be any further confusion.

Thanks for all the help guys.

[erikbjur]

Erik - are the dashed lines in your framing families symbolic or model?

I apologize for for not knowing the difference. All I used were the stock families. I drew 2 beam systems that were warped, thus insuring that all members were sloped and tilted. I then went into the object styles (global) dialog and set the joist to double dash and the girder to solid. I set the view type to course. That was it. You could also set the view type to medium or fine and then in the view object styles dialog, make the beams draw as course, just like Scott mentioned. I did notice that the Stick Symbol category was selected under structural framing. See attached picture.