Floors and Sloping Walls

When you have sloping walls in your model, it can be a little difficult to add floors and have their boundary snap to the sloping wall. You just aren’t able to pick the edge of the sloping wall where the floor intersects.

You could go down the path of setting up levels, splitting walls, creating new elements all to try and get this edge to snap to, this will take a long time and often the result isn’t 100% accurate. But, there is an easy way.

In this example the new floor is set half way up the sloping wall and in the floor sketch creation I was unable to pick the intersecting edge of the floor and the wall. The resulting floor is not ideal.

To get the floor to snap to the edge of the sloping wall, just draw the floor a little bigger than you need. (So that it sticks out from the sloping wall.

Then go to the Modify Ribbon, and pick the Join tool, and join the floor and the sloping wall.

Now you have an edge line where the floor and the sloping wall meet. (There is an edge on the inside too!)

All you have to do now is select the floor, Select the ‘Edit Boundary’ tool.

And using the ‘Pick Lines’ Draw tool. Select the internal edge for the floor. It will put a new line on the edge.

Clean up the floor sketch using the trim, and delete tools, and finish the sketch. You now have a floor that aligns with your sloping wall.

Symbolic Line Visibility

When you are working with Revit Families, Symbolic Lines are a fantastic way of showing detail without having the entire model represented.

A small restriction to some family types is the Visibility setting, ‘Show only if Instance is Cut’ which will allow you to have the Symbolic Lines appear only if the family is cut in the view. The option is greyed out in a lot of the family categories, especially Generic Models.

If you need the ability to activate this option, here is the solution.

Change the Category of the Family to a Category where the tick box is available. ‘Casework’ works fine. (It is only temporary, so is doesn’t matter about which Category it is, just one that works).

Now if you select the line and go to the Visibility Settings, the ‘Show only if Instance is cut’ tick box is available.

Once the box is ticked, if you then switch the Category of the Family back to its original Category, the Visibility Option will Grey out again but it will remain ticked.

Family Category?

To have control of your Revit model it is very important that you know the Category for all of your components. An easy way to find out what Category components of your Revit Model are, Autodesk had been rather kind and given you a couple of ways to quickly find out.

If you hover your mouse cursor over a component, and wait a second, Revit will reveal a quick info box that contains Category and Family Name information.

Another method is,

If you select a component and have a look at the Properties dialog box, you will notice that just below the type selector there is a bar that identifies what Category the component belongs to.

Both of these methods will work if you have nested components, you just have to make sure they are shared components.