Adding stairs - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to look at adding stairs. So let's get started right away here by zooming in near the front of the building. And I'm going to go directly to the Stair tool. Now, I'm not going to change any of the settings. We're going to accept all of the defaults. I'm going to simply click a point on screen here to start the stair, and then simply move the mouse a little bit away from that first point and you'll start to see the stair get created. Now you can draw the stair in any angle that you like. So just sort of move in the direction you want to go. And notice that little gray message down beneath the stair that says a number of risers created in a number remaining. So what I want you to do is move the mouse all the way so that it says 18 risers are created and zero are remaining. And when it does, go ahead and click to create our first stair. That's all we need to do. We're going to click the Finish Edit Mode and that will not only create the stair, but let's zoom in just to touch here. You can see it also creates a railing on either side, okay? So with two clicks, we've created a stair. Now let's take a look at that in 3D. So I'm going to come over here to the quick access toolbar and click the little birdhouse icon to open up the default 3D view. And let me zoom in there to get a better look at that stair. Okay, so not too bad for two clicks of the mouse. Let's tile these two windows now side by side so that we can continue to work in the plan view, but see our progress in 3D as we go. So I'm going to go to the View tab here and click Tile Views. And then just make sure that you've can see a little bit of space here on both views. So I'm just going to adjust my screen a little bit and I'm going to create a second stair in this location. So we just created a straight run stair by using all of the risers in a single run. But if we go back to the Stair tool, make sure you're in the Plan view when you do this, click on the Stair button. And this time I want you to click your start point and then move just a few risers and click again. So notice the difference both in 2D and in 3D. So here in the Plan view, we can see how many risers we've created. I've created five in my example. You don't need to do five. It's just whatever number you clicked. But notice that the little run also appears there in the 3D view, okay? Now what I'd like you to do is move away from that some distance, click and then start moving again. Notice that those two runs are going to be connected together with a landing when you click. So I'm going to create some more risers there. And you can see the landing has appeared. That's controlled by this setting here on the Options bar. Okay, so what that means is you just simply need to focus on placing runs, and Revit will fill in landings wherever they're required. And it will even shape those landings based on the context of what you're drawing. So if I kind of come over here somewhere and start drawing another run at this angle, notice that it creates an appropriately shaped landing. So now I'm going to finish this up by using up the remaining risers over here. And I've created this sort of multi landing stair now, because I've got several short runs and several landings along the way. And I'll click Finish. And of course, I get the stair that shows here in 3D and of course the railing on either side. Now those are the absolute basics of using the Stair tool just in terms of the mechanics of actually drawing a stair. Feel free to draw some other shapes if you like. And in fact, I'm going to point out just a few other tools that you might want to experiment with. We've been focused on straight run stairs, which is all I'm going to do in this video. But on your own, if you want to explore spiral and L-shaped and U-shape, you can do all of those as well. I'm going to click Cancel here to cancel that edit mode. I'm going to select this stair and delete it. Select this stair and delete it. And notice of course that that will also delete the railings. So railings are hosted to the stairs. So if you delete the host, then the hosted elements also delete. Now click over here into the 3D view, scroll down on the Project Browser. And you know, make sure 3D is active here and then double click this view called 3D stair, okay? So that's going to open up another tab in this tile on the left. And so your two 3D views are here. Then I want to click back over here into the Floor plan and pan and zoom in on the lobby area here on the Floor plan. So this 3D view that I provided in the exercise file is looking at that same space in 3D, okay? So now we're going to create the stair that's actually required for this building design and we're going to build it in the 2D view, but we're going to see it come together in 3D as we work, okay? So it's not required, but this can be a nice way to do it, okay? All right, so I'm going to go to Architecture, click the Stair tool again. And this time, I want to point out some of the settings that we've already seen but just in a little bit more detail, okay? First of all, we are drawing runs and straight run. And as I indicated, if you want to explore the other shapes later, you're welcome to do so. We're not going to do that now. We've already talked about automatic landing. We're going to benefit from that. We're going to keep that turned on. Right next to that is actual run width. Now mine is set to 3'8", which is appropriate for the building codes that I typically work under. So if you're working in imperial, set it to 3'8". If you're working in metric, go with 1100 millimeters. If you work in an area where the different building code and you want to choose a different number, that should be fine as well. But for this example, either 3'8" or 1100 should give us good results. Now looking at the Properties pallet, the stair that you're drawing should be called Steel Pan Stair. I added this type to the exercise files just to make sure that what we were seeing in imperial and metric was the same. So the name of the stair is called Steel Pan. If it's not, open up the type selector and choose it now, We're going to go from L1 to L2. So that just simply means we're going to start at the lower level and we're going to go up to the second level. Makes perfect sense. That ends up giving us 18 risers. So this parameter here that says desired number of risers that gets automatically calculated for you based on the settings that are in this type called Steel Pan Stair. Now, if I scroll down a little bit, it's calculating the actual riser height as a consequence of that 18. So if you take the floor to floor height between level one and level two and divide by 18, you come up with this number here. Okay, so you can't change that number but you could potentially change this number. If you try to set this number smaller than the number that's there, it will probably generate a warning and it will tell you that you've exceeded the maximum riser height. Okay, so I'm going to click OK there and set this back to 18. So notice it does let you click OK if you wanted to. So if you deliberately want to create risers that are too tall, it is possible to do that. Likewise, you could change the tread depth and make it smaller or bigger. But if you go smaller, that might also generate a warning. Well, let's leave this at 18. Let's leave this at whatever it was set to. It's 11 in the imperial file. It should be 275 in the metric file. Now where do those settings come from? What's actually controlling whether or not a warning displays? Well, if we go to edit type, here at the top you will see a maximum riser height and a minimum tread depth. So in the imperial file, that's seven inches for the maximum riser and 11 for the tread. And in the metric file, that's going to be 175 for the maximum riser height and 275 for the minimum tread depth. So we're not going to change any of that. I just wanted to point out to you where those settings are coming from. So simply click Cancel here and we're ready to start drawing the stair. So this one we're going to do a little bit more systematically. So I'm going to click a start point right about here in the Lobby area and start moving directly to the right. When the gray message says that nine risers are created and nine are remaining, click your second point to create the first run of this stair. Now we're going to move straight down so that we're lining up with the first run. Click a third point, move back to the left, and create the remaining risers with a fourth click, like so. And that creates a U-shaped switchback stair, and of course fills in the landing for us automatically because we had the checkbox chosen for that option. I'm going to zoom in here. And the distance between this run and this run is random right now because I just eyeballed the two runs. So to rectify that, I'm going to use a dimension just like we've done with other elements in Revit. So I'm going to use my Aligned Dimension tool or a DI, pick the inside face of the first run. And I want to look at the tool tip and make sure it says runs. If it doesn't, use your Tab key to make sure it does say runs. So if it says supports, you want to Tab. So then I'm going to go runs to runs and place the dimension over here, click the Modify tool to cancel, come back and select the lower run now. And if you set that dimension from run to run, then it should activate that dimension. And now you can type in the value that you want, which is eight inches in imperial or 200 millimeters in metric. So before we finish this, there's one more setting I want to point out to you. And that is the railing setting. When we created the first few stairs, they automatically created railings, but why? Well, that's controlled by this setting here. So you can set that, it might be set to default, you can set it to default. You can even set it to none. So if you want to create a stair without a railing, you can set it to none. But the one we are going to choose for this example is the IBC pipe railing, IBC Pipe Plate Stringer here. It should already be chosen. But if it's not, just pick it from the list. And then for the position, I want to change that to stringer, okay? So it's probably defaulting to treads. Let's change it to stringer and then click OK. Let's click the Finish button here to complete the stair. And we now get our new switchback stair complete with a railing on each side. Now you probably are getting a warning here about the inner railing telling us that there's a break in it. We're going to address that in a future video. So for now, I'm just going to click anywhere to dismiss that warning and deselect the stair. So that's the basic mechanics of building stairs. Feel free to experiment further in this file before continuing.