Adding stairs - Revit Tutorial

- In this video we're going to take a look at the process to create a simple stair. Now sometimes it's useful to work in more than one view on objects that are a little bit more complicated, like stair. So in this case I've got a floor plan open, but I'm also going to open this view over here called 3D stair. So just simply double-click that on project browser. Then go to the view tab and click the tile views button or you can type 'w + t' for the keyboard shortcut. And then I'm going to adjust both of these views to kind of zoom and pan in on the lobby area where the stair need to go. Now I'm going to work primarily in the level one floor plan, but I'm going to keep that 3D view open to kind of refer to as I go along, to kind of check out my progress. Now I'll go to the architecture tab and on the circulation panel I'll click the stair button to run the command. Now this puts us in a kind of sketch mode. And we have a variety of tools available to us here on the components panel. So the first tool is run, then we also have landing and support. Now most of the time the run tool is all you need because it will automatically create any required supports and if the automatic landing check box is turned on, which it is here by default, then it will also create any landings that are required as well. So we're going to focus on just the run tool as a consequence. Now as far as the shapes over here go, we can draw straight or spiral or 'L' or 'U' shape, but let's just stick with straight runs there for now. Now direct your attention to the properties palette. I'm going to accept most of the defaults here, but I just want to point out a few of them to you. First of all, on the type selector, there are actually three stair families, so we're doing an assembled stair, which just means its a stair assembled from sub-components. So, its got stringers and its got treads and risers and they're all like separate pieces that get put together into the stair. But you can also create monolithic stairs that are cast in place or pre-cast from concrete materials. In this case I'm going to accept the default assembled stair, steel pan stair, is the name of the type. Now if I click edit type for that steel pan stair notice that there is a maximum riser height of seven inches and a minimum tread depth of eleven. Now I'm going to cancel out of there without making any change. If you scroll down a little bit further, we've got base level and top level and then a little further down from that we have desired number of risers. So, the stair is going from level one to level two Revit looks at the total height there, divides that by the number of risers and determines what the actual riser height is. In this case, it is just a little shy of the seven inch maximum that we have, so if we exceed that seven inches it will generate a warning. So let me demonstrate. Suppose I took this desired number of risers and changed it to 17 and then tried to apply that. That would kick the actual riser height above seven inches and it would generate this warning. So I'll click cancel to reset that back to 18. So that's how those numbers come into play. Now we also have an actual tread depth right here. Now this one can't go lower than eleven, but it can be more. So what I'm actually going to do is make that a little bit larger and change that to twelve inches or one foot. Now, here you can see the actual run width. In the edit type properties dialogue the run width was specified, but that was more of a default. Here is the actual run width that will be used by this stair. You can't go lower than the default, so it can't be narrower than three feet, but you can go bigger if you want to, and in this case I'm going to make it four feet. So those are the only two changes I'm going to make. I'm going to increase my tread depth by an inch and increase my run width to four feet. Now that I've done that, I'll come over here in the floor plan and click a start point for the stair and start moving to the right. Now I want you to look at this drop down right here next. Notice that we're currently set to run center, which means that we're drawing right down the middle of the stair. There are a few other options. We've got run left and right and if I zoom in a little you can see that brings you to the inside edge of the support. Or you've got exterior support left and right, and that brings you to the exterior side of the stair. So I'm going to choose the exterior support left and then notice that there is a little gray message down below the run, it says, nine risers created and nine remaining. When it says that message I want you to click to create your first run. Now notice it will appear in both the plan and in the 3D view. Now, because I'm drawing from exterior support left, that means that to draw my next run I want to move my mouse pretty far away to allow myself plenty of room and then I'll click and start drawing to the left this time. Now notice that the message says nine risers created, zero remaining and notice that a landing is ghosting in as well. That's because of the automatic landing check box that we had turned on and we will get all of the components that are required by the stair with just a few clicks. Now, if I zoom in just a little bit here you can see numbers at the ends of each run. So this is riser one through nine and this is riser ten through 18. Now, like so many other places in Revit all I did was just sort of eyeball those points that I designated. Along the run, everything is very precise because that's all determined by the type. But the distance between these two runs is not very precise and if you were to select one of these, you do get some temporary dimensions and you can start moving their witness lines, but sometimes I think it's easier to just place a permanent dimension to help you. So I'm going to come up here and do aligned dimension or type 'd+i'. And what you want to do here is highlight the inside edge and make sure that it tells you that that's the runs and then you can click. If it says supports, don't click, press your tab key until it says runs. So I've got runs on both sides and I'll click and place that dimension. I'm going to cancel out of that command. Now if I select one of those runs, that activates that dimension and I can click on that value and type in the value I want. So in this case I'm going to put in ten inches. And that will pull those two runs closer together. Alright, so we're just about there. There's one more thing I want to look at before we click finish. Over here on the far right is a railing button. And if we click that you can see that it's set to the default railing, but you have a drop down list and you can choose something else if you wish. So I'm going to choose guardrail height and then for position it can either be treads or stringer. I'm going to choose stringer and click okay. So this means that not only will we get a stair, but we'll also get railings with it. So now I'm going to click the finish edit mode button and that will create both our stair and our railings and it only took four click to get there. So it's a pretty powerful tool, right? So now lets zoom in a little bit here at the railing in particular in the middle here. Now I think you'll notice that the railing looks a little odd. It almost looks like the rails broke, okay, and they're not continuous. So if that doesn't bother you, you can leave it alone, but if you want to adjust that, really the problem is that we haven't given the railing enough room to turn the corner. So what I'm going to do now is, back here in the floor plan, I'll select the stair again and then I'll just do edit stairs. Now we can manipulate anything about the stair that we want, in this case I'm going to focus on the landing. So notice that there are these small little triangle controls on all the sides of the landing. And on the side where it touches the stair I actually have three of those. So I'm going to take this one at the top here and start to drag it, until it's at about one foot. And then I'll take the one at the bottom and I'll start to drag it. And you can either drag it and try and snap or you can just simply start to type, so I'm going to put in one space six to make that a foot and a half. So we've just extended both pieces of the landing there and now I'll click finish and now you'll notice that the railing is wrapping around the corner a little bit better because it now has more room to make that turn. So that's a really simple modification that you can make, to improve the quality of that railing. Now there are other changes we can make and one of the things that I think is really interesting about the component stair behavior is if you modify any one of the components, it will effect the others. Now we just saw an example of that by the two runs actually shifted when we changed the size of the landing. But let's look at another example. So let's select the stair and do edit stairs again. If you click on one of the runs, I'm going to click the one at the top, notice that there are two control handles at the end. One is a small blue dot and one is a small triangle. If you drag the small blue dot, and I'll just drag it to the right, that will actually remove risers from that run and notice that I now have from four through nine, so it removed the first three risers. So now I'm going to do 'control + z' to undo that and let me show you the triangle grip instead. So with this grip if you drag slightly what will happen is any risers you remove from this run, automatically get added to this other run. So notice that I'm still going from one to 18 and if I go the other way, then it has the opposite effect. And now I'm still going from one to 18, but now I have a longer run in this direction and a shorter run over here. I'll go one more click there. Now let's finish the stair and the other thing you might notice is that has an effect on the landing. So because I have a longer run here, the landing had to raise up as a consequence. But there's one small problem with my current configuration. If we look here, this is where I need to get to when we walk up the stairs and that's close to the window. And here's the window over here, but unfortunately we're entering the stair here and wrapping around to here and we're going to come in, in the wrong spot. So all you have to do is select the stair and notice there's this little arrow control that appears here, just click that and it will flip the direction of the stair. Now we're entering in the short run and wrapping around to the long one. So now it just remains for me to move the stair into the correct position. Now to help me do that I really want to see some of the geometry from the second floor here on the first floor. So if I deselect the stair that will give me the properties of the floor plan on the properties palette. If you scroll down you will locate an underlay grouping and currently there is no underlay assigned. But you can choose any of the other levels as an underlay to the first floor. And I'm going to choose level two. When I do that, this outline here for the floor slab up above will ghost in as an underlay here on the first floor. Now I'll select the stair, go to the move command, pick a start point and pick a new point and kind of place that stair right there. Now it looks like I still have to make a few adjustments because I'm crashing into this column right here. Well all I need to do is edit this stair one more time and just adjust with that small triangle grip to add one of the risers back to this one. Click finish and then I can move it again. And you can see where it becomes this very interactive process to get it fitted in where it needs to go. So the nicest feature of these component stairs is that all those parts and pieces are connected together and it becomes very easy for you to make changes when you realize the design calls for it. And it's simply a matter of making a change and all the connected components will adjust accordingly.