Thursday, May 14, 2009

Structural columns not visible in Detail views

Recently we had an issue with a particular column from the linked structural Revit model. The column showed up fine in the architectural floor plan. The column also showed up fine in the FLOOR PLAN callout view. When we created a DETAIL callout view, the column would not show up. (see pic)

image

However, when we changed the detail level of the DETAIL callout view to “COARSE” the column showed up as a flimsy stick object.

This was an OOTB structural column. Yet, we checked the family to see if the visibility setting per detail levels was set incorrectly. Nope. Incidentally, other instances of the same family were showing up fine in other detail views.

After some irritating moments, it looks like Revit does not show structural columns in detail views if: (1) the structural column spans more than 1 floor (2) and the detail view is taken from any of the intermediate floors.

In the above example, the column spans from Level 1 to Level 3 and the detail views are taken from Level 2.

If the column is changed to go from Level 2 to Level 3, it shows up correctly in all views like

image 

Current workarounds: Plead with the Stral Engr to split the columns (highly unlikely) or create FLOOR PLAN callouts instead of DETAIL callouts.

I have filed a support request. But, I hope there is an easy tweak to resolve this issue in a big project that has lots of spanning columns and detail views!

5 comments:

David Kingham said...

What I've found is that this is related to the far clip, if you change the far clip settings to independent and then set the far clip offset to below the bottom of the column it will then appear, or set it to no clip. This isn't a great solution though because you then see everything below. Instead what I do is set only structural columns to coarse in visibility graphics, again not a perfect solution but it works decent

Nicholas Iyadurai said...

Thanks for the note, David.
Coarse setting for the columns does not work for us in details.
We have started making plan callouts.

Dee said...

I've got the same issue with columns in walls. My workaround is to make walls transparent..seems to work for now....

Unknown said...

I have found two solutions - either attach columns to floors or remodel the columns to span floor to floor. Either one seems to work

Unknown said...

I found two solutions that seem to work you can 1. attach columns to floors; 2. remodel columns to span floor to floor instead of several stories.