Auditorium steps

[march]

I am having trouble with best practice for and auditorium steps; please see attached. Essentially these are three stairs with half steps on the sides. Would you recommend the stair tool (getting boundary error), an in place mass, or a conceptual mass created in a separate mass family? You help is much appreciated.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

stair tool (getting boundary error)

Can be really clunky with this type of situation

an in place mass

Masses should not be used to create 'real' geometry.

or a conceptual mass created in a separate mass family?

see above.

Since the auditorium floor is a 'floor' I would probably create it as an in-place sweep belonging to the floor category. The half steps could be added as another floor at each location or as part of the same in-place family. The advantage of using floors include better clean up, the ability to control exactly what the profile is in section, hosting of families fro seating etc.
I'm sure if you do a search there are a number of threads on this topic.

[march]

Dimitri, Thank you for your reply. Forum connection difficulty - back now.
I've searched the posts on auditorium but nothing references our situation with three stairs. Your suggestion of a sweep family is great will give it a try. But the new floor for the half steps, how can we match it to the top of the wall sweeps? Would you recommend offsetting from the level?

[march]

Also I have to agree with the above comment about the mass family. We've created a mass family with 2D faces as a guide for making the floors and auditorium step walls below and was hoping we could apply floors to the 2D faces after importing the mass family into a project but the floors don't work. It is not clear why floors would not place to the 2D planes in the project where walls seem to work and roofs seem to be selected but don't really seem to work either. Shouldn't masses be allowed to make geometry in projects, isn't making complex geometries the reason for using the conceptual mass tool and importing it into projects?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Would you recommend offsetting from the level?

Yup. I'm a simple guy so I'd probably just set up the 'step' floor thickness as half the height of the major steps and of the same material. I'd then offset each of those relative to a single level I.e. all offset up from the bottom level or down from the top level.
To minimize management I'd probably do a single sketch for each level rather than one for each side of the stairs.

[march]

From your remarks I gather it is best to make the big stairs and then offset smaller floors from the host level. What did you mean in your comment about sweeps? Do you mean to sketch a profile of the entire auditorium section and sweep it? Why does revit not like the adding floors to imported masses. Chock this one up for learning the hard way right?