Creating Intelligent Step Down Tags

Well I am now officially blogging from KL, after finishing my role with GHD in Manila.
My new role sees me working as the Company BIM Manager for YTL Corporation with our internal, Owners, Designers, Construction and Operations team to help leverage new technologies like BIM to centralise and streamline information for our stakeholders.

My family is settled and I am working on some exciting stuff, templates, API and already helping co-ordinate some very projects which I hope to show case at some point.

Anyway as always sitting down and start from scratch brings new perspectives with experience and here is a trick that has been around for a few releases but I have never thought of using till this morning.

So a big issue with Architects and Engineers with Revit, is that whilst you can get FFL and SSL it's hard to have step downs as they are relative to the floors they are stepping down from only.

So after planning to create the new step down symbol I thought how to make it intelligent and a thought came to me, Adaptive families.

Since all adaptive components can have multiple points and be faced  based on selection I thought why not create a simple 2 point adaptive component, a shared reporting parameter and a tag.

Here is my mockup.

First create a generic adaptive component, create an additional level by coping the level up, then place a point of each level. I then created a shared parameter that is connected in the Z axis only to the elements like so.
I drew an invisible line that is 3D point based to make selection and manipulating easier in my project.

From there is was a matter of creating a tag and referencing the shared parameter as a label.

After this it is connecting the step down adaptive component to the two faces of the floors and tag the element from which you will get the reporting step down's and it will update automatically when the slabs/finishes/step downs change.

Also if the floors or finishes are removed it will automatically delete the element and tag so be sure to rehost if you need to host to a different element.

I will be at RTC in a few weeks and I hope to see many of you there.