Revit 2013 New Stair Tool @ RTC 2012

One of the big new features of Revit Architecture 2013 is the new component based Stair tool.  Although it is advertised as new 'Stair and Railing' tools, the reality is that the railings part of it is at this stage only a minor change to the existing functionality.  The stairs however, are radically different in approach, so we will all have to learn a completely new methodology.  I have done a lot of testing over the last few months, and have figured out some of the best ways to work with the new tool.  I will be doing a presentation on this at the Revit Technology Conference (Australasia) in Wollongong, just south of Sydney on 26 May 2012.

You could just look at the Revit wiki help files, but they don't really tell you how best to tackle modifying stairs or handling the annotation.  The whole process is not easy to just figure out on your own, because it is a whole lot more complicated than the old simple sketch tool - the downside of having a new tool that does more, and gives so much more control!

New Stairs:
We will briefly go through the different ways to create stairs in Revit

Creating New Stairs

Modification:
We'll go into a lot more detail on modifying them in various situations without getting undesired results.
The new shape handles seem simple at first, but they have all kinds of different effects on the stairs depending on the situation.  They may not always be the best option for modifying stairs.

Stair Shape Handles

Annotation:
We'll look at the new stair numbering feature and ways to control the stair path arrows.

Stair Numbering

Visibility Control:
We now have a lot more control over how stairs and stair annotation looks, but this adds a layer of complexity, and will require some additional up front setup work with view templates.

New Stair Subcategories

Handout:
At the end of the presentation you will get a comprehensive handout that documents the presentation in detail, and gives you all kinds of tips and tricks on using the new stair tool.

To learn more about other new features in Revit 2013, go to David Light's blog.