Creating a Live Detail in Revit Structure: Column at Spread Footing Detail

Hello, and welcome to Revit Structure. Let's get started. Now that we've placed a couple of our pre-drawn details that we created in the view and drafting view, let's go ahead and create a live detail.

What we want to do is zoom in on one of our columns with footings that we modeled earlier. Let's go to the section. This creates a live section through our building.

Let's pick it. Let's go ahead and draw our detail line. This is going to be our detail right here.

You can see we now have a depth to the viewport. We can manually adjust it, bring it back, or we can change a property or one of its parameters—its far clip offset—which means the backside of the viewport. Let's change that to 1/32 of an inch.

There we go. Let's move it up a little bit so we get a good cut. Now, as you see, we have the blank bubble.

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The first thing we’re going to do is pick it again, and we see it references a building section. Let's go back over to our Project Browser, and under Building Sections, let’s expand that section a bit. We have Section 1. This is Section 1.

Let's go ahead and rename it. Rename it as Column at Spread Footing.

Now that we've renamed it, when we place it in our detail sheet, it will reference it as Column at Spread Footing. Okay, let's go ahead and start modifying this detail. Let’s double-click the shaded area to bring up our detail.

You see the scale is one-eighth inch. Let's change that. Generally, structural details are at a scale of 3/4 inch equals 1 foot.

Okay, that adjusts a lot of our detailing. It also adjusts our text. Let's make it a detail level of Fine, which will give us more information.

And we have our background on still, so let's get rid of that. Use VV or View Graphics—VG also works.

Let's turn that off. Let’s uncheck the visibility. Click OK. There we have our basic structure that we modeled in.

Let's compress it into the area that we want to see in our section. Zoom on. Very good.

Now you notice here we have our column. We have our slab on grade, and we have our footing. Let's change this line type of footing.

Let's go to Modify. And here we have what is called Line Work, and this will change individual lines as we need them to be, should we need to change them. Here, we’re using wide lines.

Let's go ahead and pick our lines. You see it automatically changes it from the default to our new line type. Let's escape out of that.

Let's zoom in. And there you have the perimeter of the footing, column, and the floor line. Let's move this in a little bit and compress this a little bit more.

Let's shorten this line. Now, again, you notice we're outside the viewport. Our lines and level elements switch to 2D, so when we change them, it won't affect the entire drawing.

Very good. Let's pull this one out a little bit, away from the drawing. Now you see we still have the box around here—the crop region.

Let's hide that again. There you go. We have a nice detail.

Let's go ahead and start finishing it out. Let's go to Annotate. Under Annotate, we have Components.

Let's go to our first component. What we want to do is add some break lines. Scroll down to Break Line.

Right here. Again, if we hit the spacebar, it will rotate it. Right here.

Let's escape out of that. Again, there are two ways we can adjust our break line ends. We can do it in the properties, or we can just drag them into a position that we like.

Okay, let's spread these just a little bit. Very good. Now we have a detail that we can finish out.

Let's go ahead and go to our Components again. Detail Component. Let's go to Reinforcing.

Let's go to our Elevation. Again, we’ll use the Number 3 bar. Let's place it in our column, as we did previously in our pre-drawn detail.

You notice, once we get used to using the program, this becomes much quicker. Again, let's go to Annotate > Components, and you’ll notice when we go back to Components, it gives us, again, where we left off—being the horizontal rebar. Okay, let's do that.

Let's put another one in the slab here. Escape out of that. Let's stretch it out.

Okay. Again, let's go to our Components. Now let's do the section—rebar section with Number 5 bar.

Let's place it in our foundation. Again, we can put these at a given distance. It depends on the design of your footings.

Okay. Again, let's go back and place our horizontal bars for our column ties component. Let's go back to our Elevation again—Number 3 bar.

What we can do here is place it on the outside of that bar, and then align it to the outside of the other rebar. Let's go to Modify. It's just a quick way of doing this.

Instead of dragging it around—Modify. There you go. So, let's copy these.

Again, let's Copy Multiple. Draw it once, copy twice. Makes very efficient use of our time.

Let's do the first four at three inches, and then the rest at 12 inches on center. Again, you can input information on the keyboard, or you can stretch it using the given dimensions. Let's go ahead and, again, Copy.

And what we're going to do is copy our rebar into our slab. There we go. Very good.

That went very quickly. Now, let's put our dowels in. Again, let's go to Components in Annotate > Component.

Let's go to our Reinforcing Bar—the bent bar this time. There it is—the Number 3 bend. Let's place it here, and let's work on getting the lengths right in it.

Let's go to five feet. Yep, that's not the one we wanted. Let's make this one foot.

Now that we know that, we'll make this five feet. There we have it. Let's go ahead and just mirror it.

Let's slide it over a little bit. Very good. Let's copy this one.

Oops, let's undo that. Let's go ahead and grab this one, copy it. Again, what we'll do is hit the spacebar and it'll rotate it into the position that we want.

And we'll place it in our slab. Very good. Then we'll go ahead and shorten it to about three feet.

Let's finish making some final adjustments to clean this up. Again, a good-looking detail conveys information very efficiently. There we have it.

Now here's a little trick when we have a lot of lines overlapping others. We want to bring the more important information forward. We can pick it.

We can right-click, select All Instances, and choose Bring to Front. And there we have it. We've created our footing detail at the column.

So let's get out of this. But first, let's open our Foundation Plan—Level 0.

Okay. Now we want to place this on a detail sheet. So let's go to Sheet S7-1.

Let's pull this into Detail Slot Number 4. Okay. We see it's a bit big.

So again, we can make small adjustments to make it fit better. Again, we'll pull these lines in. Okay.

Let's pull this break line in and adjust it out. The grids we really don't need. So what we can do is right-click, select All Instances > Visible in View, right-click again, and hide them.

Hide Elements. And there you have it. There's your detail.

Let's deactivate the view. Let's slide it over a little bit into the bubble or the square. Let's grab our title annotation.

You see it did take on the title that we gave it—Column Spread Footing. And there you have a live detail just that quickly. Let's zoom out.

Let's close this. Now that we've placed it on a sheet in this detail slot, it’s picked up Detail 4 on Sheet S7-1. Having it be a live detail helps us out because we don’t have to go back and name this detail.

It’s already named. It carried the name over from the plan sheet. Very good.

Let's zoom out. That's it for this plan. We'll come back and start detailing the upper-level plans.

That's it for this. We'll see you in the next one.