sloped ceilings

[jeff.95551]

Is there a good way to do sloped ceilings? I've got a sloped roof structure that's pretty complicated, and am looking to attach the ceiling directly to the bottom of it. If there was a way to just pick a face or a reference plane, it would be very simple and clean. We are only using the ceilings in this case as a host for rcp fixtures, so what we've been doing is just drawing them in flat, and using a filter to turn off all the ceilings and fixtures in rooms with sloped ceilings in all the elevation and section views. It just seems like a huge waste of time to spend a lot of effort building and aligning a ceiling against a structure that already exists just to put in can lights and diffusers. There are a lot of tools for building roofs and floors, but almost nothing for ceilings...

Is there a better way?

[Teresa.Martin]

Dear Jeff;
The ceiling tool is limited. However the roof tools is not. You could just use a roof object instead of a ceiling. This would require changing your families (diffusers to host to roofs instead of floors for example. I realize this is a pain, but that is one option. Perhaps another AUGI member has a better tip.

Best regards,

[twiceroadsfool]

You can make In-Place Ceilings, which (IMHO) sucks. I hate in place families, and as someone with 3d modeling OCD, i tend to freak out when i see them used in the office, besides extreme cases of dire necessity.

I often use Roof Tools (great suggestion Teresa), and just name the types "GYP ON STUD CEILING (ROOF)," etc.

The other option is to build it in to the Roof structure you have above, just adding the ceiling finish to the bottom. Naturally, as teresa explained, think through the implications of the decision:

The Roofs will not host ceiling-hosted objects. Depending on the number of families you may want to use, this could be annoying.

Im really hoping soon we get all the ceiling options we get for Roofs and Floors and Walls, etc. At the very least "ceiling by face..." : )

[dbaldacchino]

This is exactly why face based families are better than hosted families. Then if you had a complicated ceiling, you could model a mass and then use the pick wall feature to "drape" over it. Then you could host your face based fixtures to the wall (or a roof, floor, mass, ceiling, etc.)

[jeff.95551]

Thank you all - I like Theresa's advice (like always). We already finish the roof structure with gyp. below, so the only purpose for the ceiling is to host ceiling-based families. This is one case where 'Build it like you'd build it' doesn't actually work in revit. We've already started revising many of the hosted families to work better (especially wall hosted families that screw up groups, like the bathtub and upper cabinets), so this makes perfect sense. I'm waiting for a roof function that works like you build real roofs - a combination of the trusses that Revit Structural is getting and the roof tool we have now. They're built in one step, why can't we model them the same way?

And it isn't that with lots of patience and the sketch tool and the slope arrow and lots of visits to the properties dialogue you can't get there with the tools existing now, it is just 'is it worth it?' Probably not.

Thanks again - on the next project I'll have it licked.

[sbrown]

This is one of those DUH things in revit where you just can't figure out why the ceiling tool is any diff from the roof tool except for its category. I will post a request today again incase its been forgotten that sloped and barell vaulted ceilings exist frequently in our work.

For ceilings however I don't mind the use of inplace families except you cant add the layers.

[clog boy]

There's an slope arrow in the ceiling function, when you click 'sketch'. Auto ceiling would do the same as the usual ceiling function, only when you add a slope arrow (or a few in line for a barell vaulted ceiling) it does the same as with roofs (I guess). It's up to you to see if this solution suits your needs.

[brd]

When you edit the sketch of the ceiling, there is a command called Slope Arrow. It works the same as the slope arrow for roofs or floors. The only problem though is exactly what Baldachinno and a few others described about hosting. Light fixtures are hosted to the object and not the face. So a 2x4 parabolic light fix for example comes in parallel to the ground instead of parallel to the face of the ceiling. We had a project where we wanted a simply slope for the ACT, the RCP looked fine for the most part, but since the ACT was sloped the 2x2 grid was skewed and the lines did not match up to the edge of the parabolic. As you would think, the amount the drawing gets skewed depends on how drastic the slope. The building sections looked even worse, we had to filter out our light fixtures on all of our building sections just to avoid that.

[dbaldacchino]

Hmmm if the fixture doesn't rotate parallel to the sloped ceiling, then probably the family has the option "Always Vertical" enabled. Try checking that off.