Placing Structural Elements at Upper Levels in Revit Structure

Hello and welcome back to Revit Structure. In our previous video we had placed foundations and our concrete slab on grade at our basement. Now it's time to start moving up the model and placing structural elements at the upper levels.

The first thing we're going to do is create a nine inch concrete deck for our first level. So let's go here to Project Browser. Let's go to our first level, pick it, and here we see we have our first level.

Let's zoom in on it. You see we have the architectural overlay on it. Well let's turn that off because it's going to create problems if we're trying to pick a line for our concrete deck.

So let's go to VV, Revit Links, under Visibility, let's turn it off. Okay, here we have a clean outline for our deck. Now let's zoom in and let's go to creating our floor.

Let's go Structure, Floor, and here we see we have the previous materials but not what we need. So let's take that five inch concrete slab and modify it. We're going to go to Edit Type, we're going to go to Duplicate, and we're going to call this Concrete Nine Inch Concrete Deck.

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Okay, what we want to do in our type properties is edit them. So let's pick Edit, and in our Edit Assembly dialog box we can now change the information that we need. We know as our five inch concrete slab it was part of the structure, so that's still correct, and we had our concrete as a normal weight, 3 KSI compressive strength concrete, which is still adequate.

So let's hit OK. What we want to change is the depth. Let's change that to nine inches.

Okay, let's get started. Let's hit OK out of our type properties box. Now let's get started.

Let's go to Pick Lines, and you see automatically you hover over the exterior line, and it picks it. Okay, let's continue. Very good.

Now we have our concrete slab. Now what we need to do is we need to create pockets for our steel columns that are going to be placed on top of our concrete columns below. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to come into our boundary line, pick it, make a line at 45 degrees, match it on the other side.

What we want to do is we want to break this line and chamfer it. Okay, what we want to do now is escape out of that command, highlight those two, copy, multiple, and copy it from the intersection or center line of the column to each column along this line. And at the corner, you can place it, escape out of it, delete this line, extend it, and clean that corner up.

This concrete slab will be filled in later after the structural steel columns are in place. So let's go ahead and clean this up, clean those corners up, and there you have it. Let's continue.

Escape out of that and copy from the intersection or center of the column, center of this one, extend that one, and clean up that corner. What we want to do to expedite this process, so let's copy these, but not actually copy them, we're going to mirror them about the center line of the building. Let's go to mirror, pick axis, we want to mirror it about this axis, pick it, and it creates our line source.

Okay, since they're not quite exact, they're still highlighted, we can move them into position. So pick a corner, move it vertically, there you have it. Let's clean those up.

Pick the break line. Again, break these anywhere. It's not important because we're going to come in and clean those up.

Let's do the same thing here. Let's escape out of that. Let's copy this line from this point to this location.

Now in this case, we have a different type of fix we need to do here. Since this line can't intersect, let's delete it. Let's just clean those corners up.

This will give us enough room to get our structural column placed. Okay, we're going to do one more area. So let's copy this line from the intersection, center line of column, to the center line or intersection here.

Let's again mirror this about the axis, go to break line, break this, let's clean it up. Now let's capture this, copy it, and place it at the last two remaining columns at the face of the slab. Let's break those and clean them up.

This task is a little laborious, but if you can make them on one face, skip out of this, and copy them or mirror them over. We'll do again to finish out the other side. Let's mirror about the axis, move them into position.

Let's break these lines. This one's not necessary because it is and has been taken care of. Let's clean these up.

Okay, and there you have the exterior blockouts. And would you like the wall to go up to the floor's level and attach to its bottom? And we'll answer no on this because we're going to take a look at those and I think we have already placed those at the proper position to carry this slab. Now you notice the interior columns don't have blockouts.

What we're going to do is use another method. So let's go to structure and we're going to go to vertical openings. This is another way to do it.

So what we'll want to do is we'll want to vertical. We're going to want to select a slab. What that does, it takes us to our modeling box.

So what we want to do is we want to create a box that is two foot by two foot. Actually three foot by three foot. To escape out of that, we're going to rotate it 45 degrees.

Now we're going to place it from the center line to the intersecting point of a column. Okay. Now let's copy it to the other interior columns.

And there you've created the blockouts for the structural columns to be placed coming down from above that will produce the rest of our structure on the upper levels. Let's escape out of this. Let's go to the finish edit mode.

Pick okay. Okay. There you have it.

Again, you can hide the directional span of the concrete slab. Let's take a look at this in a three dimension. Let's look at it from the top.

There you go. You notice we now have blockouts, a nine inch concrete slab, a slab on grade, walls, and foundations. Zoom out.

And that's going to finish this video. We'll see you in the next one.