Explore the concept of "standing on the shoulders of giants" in architectural design, which suggests leveraging existing resources instead of starting from scratch every time. This approach involves utilizing downloaded content from Autodesk and other programs such as BIMobject, and applying it to Revit families to create sophisticated architectural designs.
Key Insights
- The article discusses using existing resources, such as downloaded content from Autodesk and BIMobject, to build sophisticated architectural designs instead of starting from scratch every time.
- The author demonstrates how to import and utilize different railing profiles, such as the AXS Nordic railing side-mounted, into a Revit project to create realistic and bespoke designs.
- The article emphasizes the importance of trial and error in design, encouraging designers to test different settings, adjust the height and placement of elements, and edit the type and structure of designs as required.
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So the best way that I have found to learn how to fix some of these issues is by what I call standing on the shoulders of giants, which means we're not going to try and recreate or create everything from scratch every single time. But what we will do is use some of the information that we have at our disposal, and that a lot of times means getting downloaded content from the internet. If you were to go to Insert, you can actually load Autodesk content or search for Autodesk content, and we'll use programs like BIMobject, which is a pretty good resource on the internet that has a lot of manufactured products that we can borrow from. And so I've downloaded one and included it with our dataset, so I'm going to go ahead and go to Open, and I'm going to go into Revit families, and we have a couple of different railings that we can choose from. We have the AXS Nordic railing side-mounted, and then I have a profile here that we can use to kind of replicate what they've been doing.
We're going to open this one up and take a look at it. So what they've done here with this stair is instead of actually using a baluster type to make these glass panels, they've made a profile that is the height of the glass panel that they want to use here, and that profile is what you're seeing to create these panels. The actual joints in the glass are the balusters, so we'll take a look at those settings, and those joints are what you're seeing here.
And notice there's not a glass panel that's being created. That's going to be in the rail structure, which is much more complicated than what we were seeing in the baluster portion. So there's actually a glass portion here, which they've used by creating a profile to represent the glass, and that seems to work pretty well.
It does have its flaws when you start making a lot of twists and turns and things like that, but it works a lot better than the default one that we've been using within Revit. If you were looking at this and you're like, man, I really just want to use that one in my project—that looks great.
What you could do is you could select this whole thing and you can copy it to clipboard, because this is not a family. This is actually a project that they've used, and then I could jump back over to here and I could literally just paste this. You're going to get a few warnings here.
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It's just saying that some stuff is being duplicated, and that's fine. And then I could paste this into the project, and now I've got that railing, which is this one here, that I could apply because it's now part of our project, as part of our stair. And you can see it doesn't come without its own faults.
It does have some issues that we would have to resolve, but it's not a bad-looking railing. I think it's a little different for our stair design since we do have this kind of floating look, but you can see that it is pretty easy to bring that type of content in. OK, so now that we have this loaded into our project, we do have access to some of those families, and so we can try—and this is what I highly recommend you do every now and then, is just give some stuff a shot and see how it works—to try out some different settings.
And so if I were to go into ours and take a look at the rail structure, let's say I wanted to add a rail that fit into here. If I say insert, that'll allow me to add a new rail, and I can move this thing down, and I can call this one Glass Panel. And if I were to use one of the profiles that they had here—so we're looking for the Glass Stair Side Mounted—that's the profile they used.
And we'll definitely be diving into this in a little bit here, but that's the profile they used for that. And I didn't nab the height here, so we'll have to look at that in a second. We'll say two foot eight for now.
And if I put that on there, you can see that's the rail profile, and the two foot eight was not what we wanted clearly. But you can see how it's starting to put itself together in there. If I were to edit this type again, and look at the rail—I can put that back at zero.
And the height is going to be determined by this parameter, whatever those are setting it up to be. And I have one that we've created that we can use for it. And so we just have to go in and set this up, because this one is set up to be way down below.
So again, if I wanted to drop that down, then I could set the offset for this glass panel; I could set it down six inches or so—I'm just guessing here. But it would start to drop it down into the right location that we're looking for. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to import a family that we have—I'm going to delete this here—that we can work with on here.
And we're going to kind of clean this thing up a bit to refine it to have fewer elements as part of it.
