How can I make this Stair family extend beyond 360° ?

[ola6n4qrvdsr]

I have a few different familes (winding stairs, balustrades, soffits and railings, headroom clearance zones, etc), for various scenarios where the inbuilt Revit Stair tool just doesn't work well or at all. 

The only real problem I find is that the family editor doesn't have a way to create a sweep / blend where the path extends more than 360°, which is a frequent issue on almost every project we work on.

(It also seems Revit is unable to resolve the same with it's own stair and railing tools, but that's another story).  

Any ideas on how to deal with this issue?

[barthbradley]

Not sure what you are after, but you can do something similar in the Project with actual Revit Stairs.  Play with the Support Depth properties. 

[ToanDN]

Stack them up and remove the void from the lower stair.

[ToanDN]

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@ola6n4qrvdsr wrote:

I have a few different familes (winding stairs, balustrades, soffits and railings, headroom clearance zones, etc), for various scenarios where the inbuilt Revit Stair tool just doesn't work well or at all. 

The only real problem I find is that the family editor doesn't have a way to create a sweep / blend where the path extends more than 360°, which is a frequent issue on almost every project we work on.

(It also seems Revit is unable to resolve the same with it's own stair and railing tools, but that's another story).  

Any ideas on how to deal with this issue?

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If you mean Revit stair can's go beyond 360 degree then that is not exactly true.

[ola6n4qrvdsr]

The point of my question was not to discuss what the Revit tool can or cannot do. However since you ask, Revit's Stair tool is an ungainly piece of proverbial for building spiral and winding stairs, which is why we are creating our own families to supersede the Revit tool.

One example, (that any user with even the most superficial use of circular stairs in Revit will appreciate) - (from a plan view) just draw a stair going more than one full rotation ~18 risers, then delete a riser -- Revit will add an entire second loop to the stair minus one tread, your options to correct this are:
A) delete your stair and start over, B) reduce the Tread Depth to about half so the flight doesn't overlap itself, remove the extra treads and set the Tread Depth back, C) switch to a 3D view locate the grip and drag it down by one stair loop;

Another example, (using no In-Place Components) create a stair including stringers, curved glazed framed balustrades, handrails, and a soffit seamlessly connected at all points, add end posts to each flight for the handrails, continue inside balustrades at landings and join cleanly all balustrades to all intersecting walls.

I could go on with a dozen other issues with Stair / Railing tools, but for the sake of brevity;

I want to focus on the key question, (the uploaded family is just one example of the issue) which is essentially "how to create a path that extends more than 360 degrees, whether in a family or in-place sweep ?"

[ToanDN]

First, you implied Revit stair couldn't do more than 360 so I showed that it can.  If you know that it can but insist on not using it for other shortcomings then make that more clear.

Second, your example family doesn't provide any indication of the complexity you described.  If that is all you need then Revit stairs can do it easily as shown in our posts.

[barthbradley]

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@ola6n4qrvdsr wrote:

One example, (that any user with even the most superficial use of circular stairs in Revit will appreciate) - just try to draw a stair going more than one full rotation ~18 risers, then delete a riser

How do you do that? Delete a riser. 

BTW: As you can see I "tried" and succeeded in making a 360-degree Spiral with 18 risers. I'll bet you are amazed; aren't you? 

[barthbradley]

...or do you mean delete the risers (plural)? 

[ToanDN]

Deleted a riser:

Side by side:

[ola6n4qrvdsr]

@ToanDN Thanks for your suggestion.  Sorry for my previous post not being clearer, I mentioned "scenarios where the inbuilt Revit Stair tool just doesn't work well".

The Family I provided is just one in a dozen-odd families for modelling circular stairs and their related components, that our firm has developed over the last decade or so. For intellectual property reasons, I cannot upload the entirety of our stair families, but the completed stair models are vastly more complex than what Revit's (P.O.)S.tair tool is capable of.

Your suggestion to copy the model vertically to create second loop is the current method we use, however it's somewhat cumbersome than some users like, and it seems like it should be a doddle to achieve if the family allowed a path greater than 360 degrees.  This seems to be a consistent theme for detail families, dimensions, arc length parameters, inplace sweeps/blends, which all suffer from the same issue, so I'm not expecting a miracle but if there's a workaround I'd like to explore it as it might apply to a broad range of other scenarios.