Troubles with Arch. Column visibility...

[twiceroadsfool]

I have an Architectural Column family that isnt behaving very nice in my Food Court. They are the exact same family, the exact same family type... And yet, in Floor plan, the entire row on the left has an extra set of cut lines through it... Which makes it read MUCH darker. The half column family at the top acts the same way. For what its worth, in 3d the columns also appear to be a different material.

They are LITERALLY the same family. I even deleted one row and copied them right before making the PDF. The (bottom right in the PDF) column is different, and im not sure why. The bottom two columns repeat after 16 ft below the bottom of the LDF, and this trend continues, which looks weird in my perspectives.

In the family itself, under Family catagory and parameters... Its set to catagory Columns, with the box CHECKED for Show Pre Cut in Plan, and i have the box UNCHECKED for Automatically Join Geometry with walls...

Thoughts?

[DaveP]

Hi Aaron;
Not sure if this is completely related or not, but I had a similar issue with an Architectural Column.
When they were inserted as Existing, some would show filled, and some wouldn't at random.
Here's what Support had to say about it:

Only structural columns are programmed to react to the cut-fill you set in materials, the others do not. I cannot determine why your's showed as filled and I could not reproduce that using stock templates in Revit 9 (is your template/file from an earlier version?)

Revit building originally had only simple "place holder" type of columns. As customers requested more structural behavior, Revit Structure was created which then added an actual "Structural" column (Included with Building) that is inserted from the "Structure" tab on the design bar. If you don't have this tab, right click on the "Basics" tab and choose it from the list.

If you still see this erratic behavior I would make sure that you are using a stock template (provided in 9.0) to start your projects from
(Nice View, BTW)

[twiceroadsfool]

I went that route as well. My columns are NOT structural columns, but if i turn them in to Structural columns, this problem goes away. I dont like that solution, however, as they are just GFRC enclosures. They arent structural.

To clarify (because the PDF is ambiguous), they arent getting filled in at all, but two extra lines are showing up, and the lineweight is heavy. The lines are part of the blend that makes the center part of the column family. In the family, ive tried making it visible in plan, visible when cut in plan, not visible at all, etc. Either way, however its set should be consistant, yes?

Ive triple checked that any instance parameters are identical for both columns (height, base level, etc...)

[aaronrumple]

I had the same thing happen on a project. I submitted it to support and they never really did figure it out.

I think it might have been that I had duplicated the plan in the family editor so I could look at a high and low cut and Revit got confused. But I can't say for certain at this point that was the root cause.

[Henry D]

Exact same thing happened to my columns. Misery loves company :)

[twiceroadsfool]

Shoot. I was hoping someone had some insight, and it was something i had pverlooked. The client keeps asking me "why are those different... Are they a different material?" DOH...

I guess ill have to trade in my shaded views for some hidden line or rendered...

Id really prefer not to turn them in to structural column families, sigh...

[tamas]

This is just an educated guess, but the plan views of these columns look awfully familiar to me. If I recall correctly, this column family has some really small inaccuracies that cause certain cuts to fail. Try to edit the family and zoom in close to where the cylinder meets the square base. I think the circle is offset by a hair.

Adjust the extrusions to properly align where you want it and it should behave more consistently.


Tamas

[dbaldacchino]

Aaron, one other thing I would try is to re-create the family as a Generic Model and turn it to column. If there is a glitch in the column family template, this might make it go away. I guess worth a try.

[Henry D]

Aaron, one other thing I would try is to re-create the family as a Generic Model and turn it to column. If there is a glitch in the column family template, this might make it go away. I guess worth a try.

I initially created my columns as a Generic Family and later converted them to a column family. The columns were displaying correctly in plan before I converted them.