Wall Coping Best Practice

[bskripac]

Any ideas from the group on a best practices for creating items like a wall coping? The general idea is to have it show-up for renderings, as well as having it in our elevations, roof plan (so it reads cleanly) and use it as a start point for our sections and details. I tried a couple different ways and is seems that creating this item an in place family was the best route that gave me the maximum control over its creation. I started with having is as a sweep in the wall structure but had no opportunity to modify what it did once the wall was drawn. I then moved over to creating it as a Host Sweep - Wall Sweep and that worked a little better because I could control how it was wrapping at the end conditions with the "Change Sweep Returns" option. This was still took a little work to modify the ends and move them around but it got the end result I was looking for. Lastly, I went to the in place family and was able to use the Solid Sweep and Pick Path Options which seemed to work good but I wondered if there was any down side that anybody could think of.

Thanks in advance for your insight.

[patricks]

With an in-place sweep, there is no option to change the sweep return angle at the ends. I just found this out the other day and was quite disappointed, because I had to make a sweep extend into the wall an extra amount just to get the returned end on it.

[cphubb]

Patrick I think this was fixed it 2008.

I then moved over to creating it as a Host Sweep - Wall Sweep and that worked a little better because I could control how it was wrapping at the end conditions with the "Change Sweep Returns" option. This was still took a little work to modify the ends and move them around but it got the end result I was looking for. Lastly, I went to the in place family and was able to use the Solid Sweep and Pick Path Options which seemed to work good but I wondered if there was any down side that anybody could think of.

We make all of our copings out of sweeps and there is no down side except when the wall gets deleted and redrawn we lose the sweep.

[patricks]

What was fixed in 2008? I'm running 2008 and as I said above, in-place sweeps do not have the option to change the angle of the end return. Wall-hosted sweeps do, and always have as far as I know.

[cphubb]

We experienced a bug in 9.1 and the first 1 or 2 builds of 2008 that prevented the sweep from returning even if we set the angle. We needed to draw a short wall back to get the end return. We filed a support request was told it was a bug and was correct in a later build of 08. I mis understood your post a little, we use a hosted sweep for our coping and add it to our parapet wall type.

[bskripac]

So the only real difference that I can see I how we want to deal with the sweep return option. Both ways seem to be fairly good just that one issue.

Thanks for the feedback.