Placing structural columns

Structural columns are one of the most commonplace elements in many projects. They are the structural members that hold the building up and bring all the weight, also known as force, down to the ground. To use them in Revit, we need to activate the Column command from the Ribbon. So, we'll come up here and we're going to try to find our columns. So here we have Structure and Column, and go ahead and select on that. Now, underneath Properties here on the left hand side, we have what's technically called the type selector list. And if you select on it, you will get a series of different columns that we can choose from.

Unfortunately, this building is a great big building, so as a result of that all these structural members that we're looking at right here are pretty small for it. So, we need to load in a family that's going to be the appropriate size. To do that, over here, we see that there's a big button that says Load Family. Go ahead and select on that. Next, we're going to look for structural, and columns. Go ahead and open up that folder. We're going to go under Steel, because this is going to be a steel structure. And we want this Welded Wire Flange-Column.

So go ahead and just double -click on that really fast. Now, this gives us a list of all the different steel sizes that we have available to us. And we can come down on list, and what we're going to work for is going to be the 18 x 337. So, WWF 18 x 337. There it is. It's a proper size just like you get out of the structural steel catalog. And go ahead and click on Ok to that. And we'll see that it's now loaded into the project, and shows up here on the Type Selector list over on the left-hand side.

So, just make sure that WWF 18 x 337 is selected. And the next thing we're going to do is we're going to move over here, and we're going to place it at the intersection of A and 1. One thing to know is that right now, we're on the first floor, and right now it's saying depth. If yours says height already, that's great. If it doesn't, go ahead and change it to say height. And make sure that it's going up to 2 - and it's kind of getting cut off here, but it's our second-floor.

The information that shows up here is always is going to be the same information you see here underneath the Views. Now, just click over here once, right at the intersection, and you can see it almost snaps to the point. In fact it kind of feels like a snap to point, if you move your mouse ever so slightly. And it and it does. And currently it's placing this column in from the first level up to the second level. Now, we could take the time to do this on each and every one of these. In fact, the ones we want to do it are going to be through this area of the grid right here.

We're going to have a couple of special columns placed in later on, over here. So, the faster way to go about placing each and every one of these is using this command right here that says At Grids. So, if you select At Grids, then move over here, click and hold the mouse button down, and create this window around your structural column grid. Once you get to this point, you'll already see sort of the highlights or outline of each of those columns we are getting ready to be placed. The next thing we want to do is--and this is always important--is to click on the big green checkmark up at the top of the screen. And that's for Finish; we want to finish the sketch.

Once we've done that, we now have those columns in place. And let's go ahead and take a look at these in the 3-D view. And to do that you can just click on the loaf, default 3-D view house up here at the top of the screen. So, we've placed all these columns of the right size here along the structural grid. Now, these just happen to be the ones between the first and second floor. We still need to place these same columns all way on up the building. So, in order to be able to do that, let's go ahead and go back to our First Floor plan.

Next, we're going to do that same sort of window move that we did before, and just click over here, window around. I don't really want our structural grid to be in this. So, we can use another tool here which is called Filter, and you can just click on the Filter; and then click where it has grids, so that only structural columns has a checkmark next to it, and click on Ok. By doing this, we can see just our columns are highlighted now. We didn't really need the grids, because the grid was already going all the way on up through all of our floors anyway.

So, now that we have that all highlighted, we can come up here and there is this option here that says Copy to Clipboard; make sure you hit this one. There is technically a Copy command over here, but this is not the same as Copy to Clipboard was shows up over here. Once you've copied it to the clipboard, there is the option here that says Paste. Now, don't do the old Windows standard Ctrl + V in order to paste things in, it won't work the way you want it to. But if you click on the word Paste, there is an option here that says Aligned to Selected Levels; click that.

This is going to give us a list of all the different spots, so we can copy these things that we've just selected on up to. In this case, we want to copy them from the second floor all the way up to the ninth floor. And because of their height, and they know that they should go between floors--in this case it had been between floors one and two. What it will do when it gets to the ninth floors is it will copy it between the ninth floor and up to the roof structure. So, go ahead once you have these highlighted-- and you can do that by just clicking once and then holding down the Shift key and clicking the next level--click on Ok.

Now, this could take a few seconds, because right now it's copying and pasting each of these columns up floor by floor by floor. Now, we can kind of verify that, if you look here back in our 3-D view again; and now we can see each of these have been copied up. And by the way, if you want to be able to spin this around so you can see it a little bit better, You can just hold the Shift key down on your keyboard, and then hold down the wheel on your mouse, and just gently rotate your mouse around. And now you can see each of those columns and each of them have been brought up to each floor where they are supposed to be at.

So, structural columns could be placed by single clicks or by selecting the structural grid they will be associated with. Also remember that we can load different column sizes by using the Load Family tool when executing the command.