Placing Foundations and Grade Beams in Revit Structure

Hello, and welcome back to Revit Structure. As you recall in our last video, we had created our grade beam family. Now it's time to place foundations in our building model.

First thing we need to do is go to our basement level, because this is where our foundations are going to be placed. Let's zoom in. First thing we're going to do is place isolated or spread footings at our interior columns.

Let's go to Foundations, isolated, and we have our 8' x 8' rectangular isolated spread footing. Let's start placing those at the interior columns. You see it automatically snaps to the intersection of our grid lines, which is where we want it to be.

Okay, after we place our first one, we get a notation here, an attached structural foundation will be moved to the bottom of the column, which is where we want it to be, and our program automatically does that for us. Let's continue. We get that notation with every foundation we place.

Don't worry about it, it's where we want it to be. Let's continue. Let's escape out of that.

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Now what we want to do is we want to insert our grade beam family into our program. Let's go to Insert, Load Family, and this brings up our Load Family dialog box. We are going to go to our BIM structure folder on our C drive, find our grade beam family, pick it, and load it.

Now that we have it loaded, we can start placing our grade beams at our earthquake-resisting elements. So let's zoom back out. By design, our engineer will tell us where he wants us to place our grade beams.

In this case, we're going to start at grid line 1, between B and C, with our first element. What we want to do is make sure we have the grade beam centered between grid lines. So let's go to Structure.

We want to place a reference plane. So pick the reference plane, place it, it doesn't matter where, what we're going to do is we're going to put a dimension on it, and give it equal spacing. Okay, at the intersection of grid line 1.1 and our reference plane is where we're going to place our first grade beam.

Okay, let's go back to Structure. Let's go to Isolated. Here we have our grade beam.

Okay, the size of the grade beam we will adjust in a moment, but right now what we want to do is we want to place it at the intersection of our grid, of our wall, between the columns. Let's escape out of that. What the engineer wants us to do is he wants us to extend the grade beam 5 feet past each column, or past the center line of the grid lines.

So let's measure. It's 23 feet 6. Okay, let's continue. Let's escape out of this.

The reason we use type parameters as opposed to instance parameters is now we can pick our grade beam. We can go to Edit Type. The first thing we want to do is rename this.

We want to rename it GB-1. This will be our first grade beam in our project. Okay, by design that the engineer will provide us, he will give us a depth.

In this case it's 3 feet. And he stated that he wants it 1 foot below finish floor because that will place it at the bottom of our walls and columns and a general width of 6 feet. Now as we measured previously, we had 23 feet 6 plus the 10 feet past each grid line, or 5 feet past each grid line.

We want 33.5 feet. Hit OK. Apply it.

Okay. And there you have it, your first grade beam. Okay.

Let's go to our next location, which our engineer has told us is between 3 and 4 at grid line 8.1. Again, let's place a reference plane. Let's dimension it. Again, the dimension is not important.

All we want to do is make sure it's equal distance. Okay, let's go to structure. Isolated.

And you see the grade beam has held the instances that we gave it at the previous location. Let's rotate it by pressing our space bar and place it at the intersection of our grade beam and reference plane. Okay, let's escape out of that.

But first, let's measure to see that we have the proper length on our grade beam. In this case, it's 24 feet 6. It's one foot longer. So what we're going to do is we're going to pick the grade beam, go to edit type, and we're going to duplicate it.

We're going to call this one GB2. Hit OK. And what we're going to do is we're going to change the length of our grade beam to 24 feet, 34 feet 6, which is 10 foot longer than the previous.

Hit OK. And there you have it. Five feet either side of our grid line.

Okay. Now let's check very quickly. The length here is 23 feet 6. And the length here is 23 feet 6. So instead of making another grade beam, we know this one is the same.

Let's just copy it. From this place to this intersection. Okay.

Let's check these lengths. Since we've already done the work once, we can copy the previous instance from the intersection to the intersection, which has saved us time. Now we can move on to placing the next grade beam.

We can get rid of this information. It's no longer needed. And we can create the grade beams for our next elements.

As you can see, we have spread footings or isolated footings at these two columns. The grade beam placed here will act as a tie beam. So let's go to isolated.

Grade beam. Let's escape out of this. First thing we want to do is we want to create a reference plane and center it again.

Let's dimension it. Again, equal distance. Now let's go back to isolated.

Grade beam. And at that intersection we'll place it. Let's escape out of this.

As you can see, it's longer than our footings. What we want to have is the ends of our grade beams at the same location as the ends of our footings. Plus, by design, this grade beam is going to be a little smaller.

So let's pick it. Again, edit type. Duplicate.

And we will call this grade beam GB3. Okay. What we want to do is the engineers told us that the depth is now 2 feet and the width is now 4 feet.

Is it okay? Now we have a narrower grade beam as a tie beam. First thing we want to do is we want to measure to see what the length is. From end to end is 30 feet 6. So what we'll do is we'll pick our grade beam.

Again, go to edit type. Change our dimension to 30.5 feet. Hit okay.

You see now everything is lined up properly. Again, let's check the opposite hand side to see if it's the same. Since it is the same, instead of drawing it again, let's just copy it.

Save some time. There you go. Fits perfectly.

Let's erase this information. It's not needed. Now let's check the information in this direction because we've got a grade beam at this location and at this location.

Let's go to measure. That distance is 24 feet 6, which is different. Again, and this is out to out is 31 feet 6, which makes it a foot longer than this.

Okay, let's go back to structure. Isolated footing. And again, we can place the same grade beam.

Space bar. And at this point, our building is telling us that we're already centered. We can come here, place it.

Escape out of that. Okay, again, we can come in here. And to save time, we can change it to a GB3, which gives us our general parameters.

But now we see it's a little short. So let's measure again. Our out to out is 31 feet 6. So let's pick our grade beam.

Edit type. You see we're a foot short. So again, let's duplicate.

Create GB4. And make it 31.5 feet. Okay, there you have it.

Let's check this dimension on the other side. If it's the same. 24 feet 6. Grid is the same.

31 foot 6. Again, since it's drawn, let's just copy it. Save ourselves some time from drawing it twice. Okay, now that we've placed all our grade beams and interior footings, let's finish placing isolated footings on the rest of the columns at the exterior.

Again, structure. Isolated. And pick a rectangular footing.

Okay, again, the intersection of the columns. And you'll get the same notation. Again, it's a good thing.

So let's not worry about it. And complete our structural footings for the columns and the lateral systems. Okay, did you see what we did? There are a couple of these footings that aren't properly placed.

Let's go back. You see we have a footing here that we have a grade beam. We don't need it.

Let's get rid of it. We have a footing here we don't need. Let's get rid of it.

There we go. Let's look at this in a three dimension. As we can see, we have all of our footings placed.

In the proper positions. Grade beams. That's tie beams.

Grade beams is exterior earthquake resisting elements. Let's get out of this. Let's zoom out.

And that's the finish of this video. I'll see you in the next one.