Structural Roof Revisions in Revit: How to Align Beams and Columns for Architectural Clear Story Integration

Hello and welcome to Revit Structure. Let's get started. Now that we've finished the revisions at the stairs, at the floor levels, let's move on to the roof.

Let's go to our project browser, our structural plans. Let's go to our roof. Let's pick it twice.

Now that we're at the roof, we can see the revisions that the Architect has made. Let's take a look. Let's zoom in and here we can see the outline of the Architect's new clear story.

Let's get a section to see exactly how this is going to come together. Let's go up to our quick toolbar. Let's pick section and let's run a section horizontally across the page.

Let's zoom out a little bit and adjust it down. Okay, now that we have that, let's pick the bubble twice to show our live section. Let's compress it a little bit and let's expand it so we can see our new roof line and there it is.

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Let's give it a scale that we can work with now. A quarter inch is good. Okay.

What we want to do is we want to bring in the architectural background. So let's go to VV. Let's go to our Revit link.

You can see the visibility is on. Let's halftone it. Let's go to our display settings and we want it linked by view.

And we see that we're linked to the east elevation. That will work for us. Let's click out of it.

Let's apply it. Let's hit okay. Let's apply and okay.

Okay, what we see here is the roof line of the architectural background. What we're going to do is we're going to tab on it and actually we're going to copy it and paste it into our model in the same place. Okay, we get a dialog box.

It tells us we have a different level type, which is okay. Let's pick okay. Now let's turn off our architectural background.

1. Let's go to Revit links. Let's turn off the visibility.

Hit okay. And here we have the architectural roof line. What we want to do is we want to change it to a material that we can use in our structure.

So let's pick it. Let's go over here to our properties. Let's do the pull down here and we see we have one and a half inch steel deck.

This is what we want to use structurally for our new roof. So let's pick it and it automatically changes it. We notice that the bottom elevation of the roof line hasn't changed and that's exactly where we want it.

Okay, let's move on. Let's zoom out. Let's close this view.

Let's go back to our plan. Okay, what we see here is we have the outline of the new clear story over the structural model. What we want to do is we want to clean out these bays so that we can give the open area to the Architect so he can have a clear story down to his lower level.

So what we want to do is we want to tab and pick the beam system and then delete it. We want to do that with this beam system. This one, this one, this one, this one, and in general just this area.

So go ahead, tab on it, pick it, and delete it. Continue on and finish out the rest of these six bays. Okay, now that we've cleared this area out, what we want to do is we want to bring in support beams for some new columns to support this clear story and the roof above.

But the first thing we want to do is we want to adjust our view range so that we can see the outline of the new roof. So pick view range, go to edit, and we're going to change the top elevation. We're going to change that to 12 feet.

Let's hit apply. We still don't see the roof line, so let's change our cut plane to 12 feet also. Let's hit apply, and there we see our new roof.

As you can see, we have a little cut off portion, so we aren't quite high enough. Let's take it up to 14 feet and see how our roof lays out. Let's hit apply, and there you have it, the full plane of the new roof line.

Let's hit apply, okay, and let's move on. Okay, now that we have our roof in, let's hide it for the moment so we can see the outline of the architectural model below. Let's pick it, and let's go to the glasses down here and do a temporary hide on it.

Hit hide element, and there we have it. Now the next thing we want to do is we want to bring beams into this location along the clear story so we can support our columns and brace the beams. Okay, let's get started.

First thing we want to do is we want to check to see what size beam we have, which is a 5-1-8 × 16-1-2 inch glue lamp, so let's go find the same type. Let's go to our structure tab, structure panel. Let's go to our beam tool.

Let's pick it. Okay, let's go to our drop down in our properties box and find our 5-1-8 × 16-1-2 inch glue lamp. Let's pick it, and we want to use a 3D snapping because the elements we have are sloped.

We want the slope of the new beams to match. Okay, let's zoom in a little bit. Let's pick here, here, at the end of that beam to this girder.

Very good. Let's do it on the other side. Let's pick here to here, end of that beam, zoom in, and let's drag it to the new beam.

It didn't seem to attach, so let's start here and work backwards to here. Okay, it says it may be slightly off, but we're okay with that. Okay, now that we have our beams in place, we can start setting our columns.

The column we want to use is a tube steel column, so let's again go to our structure tab, our structure panel, and our column tool. Let's pick it. Okay, we don't want a concrete column, so let's see what options we have.

In our properties box, let's do the pull down. Here we have a hollow structural section, which is four inches by four inches by half inch thick walls. That's the one we want, so let's pick it.

And we want to have height on it, so let's pick height, and we want it to go to the high roof. That's correct. Okay, let's give it placement.

Where we want these is atop the existing column here, atop the… Well, no, we don't. Let's go back. Let's undo that.

What we want to do is we want to have the columns at the intersections of our new beams and our existing girders, so let's put one here. Let's put one here. Let's put one here.

Let's do the same thing on the opposite side. Zoom in here. Let's place one here.

Let's place one here, and let's place one here. Okay, let's escape out of that. Let's go to modify.

That will cancel our command, and I noticed we did have a little offset in our beam. What we can do is we can align this beam to the new beam here. Let's go to our modify tab.

Let's go to our modify panel. Let's go to our align tool. Let's pick that.

Let's align it to this beam right here. Let's pick this one and then align this one. Now we have our beams in alignment.

Let's go to modify and escape out of that command and continue on. Okay, now that we have finished placing our columns, let's move our section. Let's stretch it out a little bit.

Let's move it so that we can see the section through the columns and the new roof. Let's pick it, and let's look to see what we have. Let's change our appearance, our detail level to fine, and there we can see our new columns.

What we want to do is we want to attach the top and the base to existing members and to the new roof. So again, let's go to the modify tab, modify panel, or actually let's not. Let's go back.

Let's pick the column, and we can go to our modify column tab and attach the top base. First thing we want to do is attach the top to the roof. It will do it automatically, and it says it's attached to a non-structural target because when we copied the roof in from the architectural plan, it is still considered an architectural piece of the model.

Okay, let's continue on. Let's zoom out. Let's pick our column.

Let's pick our other column, and you can do as many columns as you like. Let's attach top to the new roof. Again, we get the same message.

Not a problem. Now what we want to do is we want to attach our columns to a base, which are the glue lamp beams. So again, let's pick the column, and since they're offset glue lamps, we'll have to do them individually.

Okay, let's attach, and here we have an option in our option bar. Let's pick base and pick the glue lamp. There's the attachment there.

Let's pick this glue lamp, or actually, let's pick this column. Attach. See our base is set.

Pick the glue lamp. Our column is set. Again, we want to do that one more time.

Attach top, and we're at the base, so we pick the glue lamp we want to attach it to. Very good. Let's get out of this view, and let's move our section view to the other side, and let's look at this and do the same thing.

First thing we'll do is we'll attach our columns to the roof line. So let's pick our columns, hold control down, pick the next one, next one, attach, and we want to change this to top to the new roof line. There we have it, and again, we get the same notification.

Not a problem. Now let's go back and do the bases. Okay, let's pick our column, attach.

Let's change this again to base. That one's attached. Unjoin elements.

That's okay. Let's place the last one. Let's pick the column, attach.

Base is set. There we go. Now we notice our glue lamp is a little off of its mark.

Let's fix that. Let's bring this here and attach it to that end point. There we have it lined up, and here we have it lined up.

We're good to go. Now if you notice, our beams are a little bit low. What we want to do is we want to check our elevation of our offset value.

We see that our geometric positioning, our start extension, our end extension, are at zero. Our y offset is zero, but our z offset is three quarter inch. We want that to be zero.

Let's pick that. Set that to zero. Very good.

Zoom out. Let's close this view. Move our section to the other side and check those beams.

And they're slightly off also. Let's pick those. Let's reset those to zero.

Very good. Let's zoom out. ZA.

Let's close this view. Let's zoom in on our area and see that we have our column set, our beam set, and our roof set. That's it for this video.

See you in the next one.