Discover the intricacies of customizing railing profiles to meet specific project needs, including setting dimensions and materials in Revit. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to modify an existing railing profile, in this case, a glass rail profile, to fit into a design scheme.
Key Insights
- Modifying a railing profile in Revit involves understanding the dimensions required and making appropriate adjustments. For instance, the panel height could be adjusted from a full height of three foot six to two foot eight to match the design scheme.
- When adjusting railing profiles, it's crucial to move the dimensions from the bottom up; this is contrary to the intuitive movement from top down. Adjustments may need refinement through a process of back and forth until the correct settings are achieved.
- It is also possible to modify the appearance of the profile, such as changing a clear material to glass. Additionally, the baluster placement can be adjusted for aesthetic considerations, along with adding extra components like a bottom rail for a more refined look.
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Let's take a look at that railing profile so that we can get an idea of how we can use it. And one of the things that we'll want to do is understand how we're going to use it. If we wanted this panel to be like you see here from zero to two foot eight, then we could do that.
But we need to make sure that our profile works for our needs. So I'm going to open it up and it's going to be this glass rail profile. This is a Revit family.
And you can see it's the full height. If it goes from zero to three foot six, that means it's going to run the entire length. If we wanted to, we could set this so that it was lower.
And in our case, we were looking at something more like the two foot eight dimension. And so keeping in mind that these are just lines that we use. And so it seems tempting to to go in and move this thing from the top down, but it's actually backwards and we move it from the bottom up.
If I change this value here to two foot eight, that's now the piece that we're going to have for our project. And so if we look at our 3D view here, we're talking about two foot eight, which is going to be from this distance going up. And so what I'll do is I'm going to jump in and I'm going to cut a section through this.
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Oh, we already have one. We'll use the section that we have here. And you can see that this is the glass panel piece.
And so if we wanted that glass panel piece to sit between through here, you can see it's actually going to be about two foot four. If we wanted it to be full height, say from the top of the tread here to the bottom, then that's going to be more like two foot eight. So those are things that you have to determine.
And I think if we try to get it to fit in with the two foot four, that might be a good option for us. So let's go ahead and change that to two foot four. And then we can load it into our project.
And what's cool is we can come back and forth, checking this thing out, making sure it works and then going back through. So a lot of times in the class, you'll see we just go through and everything, we kind of just hit it right on the first time. And the reality is, there's a lot of back and forth and kind of refining that we have to do to get those settings correct.
So there's never, there's never really going to be just a straight shot solution when you're doing things like this, because we are pushing the program to its limits a little bit here. So I'm going to do load into project. I'm going to go ahead and load it into our project file here.
And then we can apply that profile. And this is a, this is very much going to be a fingers crossed operation here, because we'll see how, how this gets loaded in. And so I'm going to select it.
And we'll add that new rail type. I'm going to call it glass panel, we're going to set that height to four inches, because we want it to be four inches vertically. And then we'll set it to that glass panel type that we we just modified.
We'll set that railing to have a glass material. So I'm just going to go into materials here. And what I do is I'll just type in glass, and we'll grab that one.
And that's important, because if we don't do that, then it'll show up as a clear material. And you can see that is an interesting look that we're getting there. And that's because I set it to be four inches, and I actually need to set it to be two foot eight inches.
So let's do it one more time here. Because two foot eight is the height that we want it to sit at, because we did it, we created it top down. And so you can see it actually fills in those voids that we weren't getting from our previous solution.
If I go here again, I can now go into the balusters, and I can actually take out the ones we're not using. So this glass panel, this one is no longer needed. We'll hit delete.
And we don't have to worry about that being a headache anymore. So that's a good one. We'll hit OK.
Take a look at it, make sure everything looks good. Looks kind of crazy, because this is now going at a one foot four module. And so we'll go ahead and take a look at it again.
When we look at the baluster placement, you can see that this is the baluster that we're talking about, that two inch by one half inch flat bar that's going vertical here. And the pattern is set to a distance from previous of one foot four. We can set that to two foot eight.
And this is another one of those ones where you're going to want to check it out a couple times. We'll hit apply here. And that looks much better.
We'll hit OK again. And now we've created the custom railing that we were hoping to see. The only other thing that I might consider doing, because it just looks like the glass is kind of floating here, is maybe putting a bottom rail on that.
So it'd be the same type as this one. And setting that to be at that four inch dimension. So let's go ahead and do that.
So this would be another rail structure. And you can see rail one, rail two, glass panel. So I'll go ahead and say insert.
And I'll call this one bottom rail. And we'll set that at four inches. And I'll set it to the square handrail type, the one inch one.
And hit OK. And now we've got our railing set in place here. And it looks pretty good at the landings where we have it flat.
But it's still a little off on the stair portion. But the railing does look significantly better than when we started. A lot of what we're seeing here is elements that can be modified based upon where these breaks occur.
So this is transitioning from sloped to being a flat portion. Where you can see this is a flat portion of the railing here. And this one is as well, because it's hosted to the landing.
And so by manipulating this transition, you're able to kind of refine some of the bottoms of the stair and the railing relationships. For the purposes of our project here, we're going to go ahead and leave it as is. And then we're going to go ahead and take a look at some of the rest of the interior and some of the things that we need to do on level two with this railing to create a guardrail condition there.
