Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Slab Depression - Part 2

I stated that using Revit leads to expansive thinking. Often when I re-visit a recently-constructed family I add to it, enhance it or improve it in some way. When I began the previous post the drain annotation was not nested with equality constraints. That was an on-the-spot improvement. This is another example.


For the same project I also needed an L-shaped slab depression. Starting with the previous family, I added a second reference plane in each direction, and created additional instance parameters for each.

I added the slope lines and constrained their end points to the planes. That was fine as long as the floor drain was placed separately, but I realized that automatically locating it at the intersection of the slope lines was a challenge. 


After some deliberation, it occurred to me that the drain location could be established parametrically, and if the slope lines could be constrained to the corners of the object, I might also be able to lock them to the drain annotation object. This was accomplished by placing two grouped reference lines and constraining the slope line end-points to their intersection. 



New 'Offset' instance parameters were established to control the location. The drain annotation was aligned and locked to the reference lines.




assigned the slope lines to a new subcategory 'Slab Depression Slope Lines' to allow view-specific visibility control.







When the object is highlighted in the model triangular grips appear for all parameters. I have also revised the original rectangular slab depression, incorporating these improvements.



Revit is expansive. 
For all three families download GEN_Slab-Depression.zip from the Files and Families tab above .

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