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Guardrail & walkway Revit instruction video

View Revit user guide

Download guardrail and walkway Revit files

Video transcript

This video will provide an overview of the range of guardrail and walkway components that we at IGS BIM Solutions have created as part of the SAYFA Revit library.

On the SAYFA website coming to the GW300 guardrail and walkways page, we can see a range of products here from stand alone guardrails with a variety of mount types as well as combined guardrail and walkway systems and the standalone walkways in both aluminum and fibre. Jumping to Revit, we have an extracted view here from the SAYFA Revit virtual showroom file, which is a project file containing all of the various SAYFA components laid out side by side.

This is a very useful resource for not only assessing model geometry, but also the metadata stored within prior to copying and pasting within your projects. Taking a look at this particular product offering in Revit, we have a selection of specialty equipment families, so these are represented as line based families. We have a series of standalone guardrails. These have been broken up in individual families based on their mount type.

We have the metal deck, the side mount and the top mount. We also have the fold down and heavy duty variants of these where applicable. We then have three families that are representing the standalone walkways and a further four families to represent the combined walkway and guardrail systems. So that could be a walkway with a guardrail on one side or a walkway with a guardrail on both sides, as is the case with this particular family highlighted.

When placing these elements, I’ll just select the aluminum walkway. Being line based we initially have the ability to select if we want to place this on a work plane or place on a face. So work plane will prompt us for a level or a named reference plane within our project. Placing on a face is of particular use say here where we have a roof that has a slope applied to it.

I’m easily able to select the top base of that roof. Clicking once will define the start of my walkway. Moving my cursor around I can apply an angle if applicable and selecting a second point will generate the walkway at that desired length. So the advantage of using the place on face option there is if the slope of this roof were to change, you can see that the componentry dynamically adapts its orientation to ensure that it’s always mirroring the slope of the hosting element.

In terms of the parametric control, I’ll just start with the walkways here. So coming to a ground floor plan, depending on the complexity of the path of your walkway or guardrail, you may wish to use some detail lines to sketch a reference path here. I’ll then select that same aluminum walkway family, and from here I’m easily able to just select the end points of those lines that I drew.

And what you’ll notice straight away is that we have this non continuous run of walkways. This is where we would need to make some parameter adjustments. In here we have the walkway angle end one and end two parameters. I’m going to change the angle at end two to be negative 45 degrees, which is half of my internal 90 degrees. This second instance is going to be negative 45 again at end one this time. And because we’re going from an internal to an external corner, I’ll change to a positive 45 degree at end two. And my last instance here will get a positive 45 degree angle at end one. This leaves us with a nice clean run of walkway that has these mitre joins. If I come to a 3D view, I just want to highlight that the geometry of the walkway itself has been modelled as a solid extrusion.

We do have a material applied though that’s using a cut out map. This is done intentionally to not impact project performance but maintain a realistic appearance when rendered. If you do have any issues with the appearance of the walkway, you may need to adjust the Revit rendering settings. The steps to do that are outlined in further detail in the associated SAYFA Revit user guide. Before jumping on to some of the more complex families, I’ll just highlight that within these walkway families and many of the guardrail families, we have this roof pitch parameter.

So essentially what that is doing, it doesn’t really apply in the case that we’ve got down here where I’m just drawing on a level surface. But if I come over here where we actually have a slope applied to this, we do want to make sure that the roof pitch here is always matching the slope of our hosting roof.

So in this case we have a slope of 15 degrees applied to this roof. We would need to make sure that the roof pitch is also at 15. It’s not going to physically change the orientation or the angle of the element itself, but it does have an influence on these cleat elements that sit on top of the walkway. Essentially, if I change that to 7 degree, you’ll see that those cleats disappear altogether.

If I change it back to a 15, they come into play. If I change it to a 30 degree, the spacings decrease between those cleats. So it is important that the roof pitch is always mirroring the slope of the hosting element. Just while them here as well, we do have these families that have the levelled suffix in their fall name. So three in total. One is this one here, we then have one for the single guardrail and the double guardrail line systems. We can again set a roof pitch on these. These are a bit different, though, because it has this additional geometry of the leveling kit, and that will change the angle of the actual walkway itself to ensure that it’s always sitting horizontal.

So essentially, if I was to change this to 30 the legs on those extension elements will extend, but it does leave us with a walkway that is no longer horizontal, which again, we just want to make sure is corrected by making sure that the roof pitch matches the slope. Just taking a look at the combined guardrail and walkway system here, I just want to go through the key parameters because it is important that the recommended order that these get edited in are followed just so you’re not having to redo anything as there is relationships between various elements within the guardrails.

If I were to come down to my project browser and select the guardrail one side and I’ll just take a section so we’re looking at the front of this. Now we have a range of parameters in here. These are relating to the vertical and horizontal guardrail members, as well as obviously control over the walkway angles at end one and end two, as we saw in the previous example. What I can do here is initially I would want to set, if applicable, a post offset length at end one or end two. Doing so if I were to apply a 500 offset length at end one, it’s going to push that first post in from our end one of the walkway by 500mm. You would have notice that the ends of our handrail and kneerail followed, which is why we would typically want to make this adjustment first if you need to. This is going to be necessary when you are wanting to combine instances of this family, as shown before, with corners to create a continuous run of walkway and guardrail system.

From here we’re able to adjust the handrail overhang. Now this is going to define the dimension from the end of our guardrail to the face of that initial post here, which by default is set to 300. But I could easily change that to whatever it needs to be to match up with the adjoining instance. So there you would have noticed that the narrow follows the handrail. So it definitely is important that the order to follow here is post offset, handrail overhang and that is followed by a kneerail offset. Here. I can have a value of say 150 at my end one. That will extend the end of my kneerail out by 150mm. If I were to put a negative 150 here, we’re actually insetting it in towards the centre of our walkway.

The toe board is the final piece of the puzzle here and what we can do is apply a offset because this is related to the walkway itself. So those initial click points. It doesn’t matter so much what order we do the toe board adjustments in it is just important that you know that they’re there. So again, we can have a negative 200 or a positive 200, and that’s not affected or affecting any of the other geometry within this particular family.

Just to show a similar example as the walkways, I’ll just go back to my ground floor plan and create a new instance of that family. And let’s just say we want to go around a corner. Now here because our default post offset is at zero you can very quickly see that we have interaction here between the posts of our instances.

Essentially what I’m going to want to do there is select my initial instance and apply a post offset initially of say 400. Same too with the instance two will go and one post offset links 400. That’s going to offset those post elements and it is now ready for us to make adjustments to the handrail and kneerail components. From here might be best if I go to a plan view. I’ll apply the walkway angle negative 45 at end two for that instance and negative 45 for end one for my second instance. Here I can see that my handrail component needs to extend by a further 100mm, let’s say.

So I’ll do this in 3D and my end two handrail overhang will just change to 400 and 400 on our end one for that secondary instance. We can get more granular if we wanted to, you know, make sure that these kneerails are actually sort of sitting within each other. I can come down to my kneerail offsets and maybe we put a 40mm offset on that one just to get some sense of joining there.

Jumping back to the walkway with two guardrails I just want to point out that because we have the guardrail element on both sides, we have those exact same parameters and it is recommended that you make the adjustments in the same order for this family. But we also have an additional set to update the geometry for the secondary guardrail. Handrail one overhang length end one and handrail one overhang length end two. These are essentially going to drive the geometry of that external guardrail in this case. But then the handrail two, the kneerail two and the toe board two, these are all going to control the same geometry but on the opposing guardrail. When it comes to the levelled combined system, so this one here. This has the same functionality as what we were looking at with the walkway, where the actual walkway geometry remains consistent, assuming that we’re ensuring that the roof pitch matches the slope of our roof.

However, we do have some additional controls in here around the returns. So down under the visibility settings, we have two tick boxes for turning on or off a return at either or both ends that will automatically turn on the handrail, kneerail and toe board at that end, where we’re wanting to go around a corner and back up the slope. The dimensions of those extensions there can be controlled via the handrail return overhang length, and I’ll just go with end two, because that’s what we’re looking at closest on screen here, 800, we’ll extend that out and the kneerail return offset at length two can be changed as well, again, positive or negative. Depending on the slopes and the angles that you’re wanting to have these instances interact with each other these parameters can all be tweaked to get something that looks very much like the finished product.

We do also have some visibility control across a lot of these families for example, the fold down guardrails, we have a top mount and a metal deck mount fold down. These can be displayed in the folded position using this folded tick box. You can see that the geometry updates have showed that guardrail instance in the folded position there.

You will also notice that on these fold down guardrails we have a 3D required space showing the clearance zone around the guardrail. These are consistent with the other SAYFA components and can be toggled on or off on an instance basis using the required space tick box here. Alternatively, if I just go to my visibility graphics for this particular view and come down to the specialty equipment category, there is a required space subcategory that can be deactivated and that will toggle off the visibility of those required space components across the entire view.

Finally, on any of the guardrail components, we also have an additional parameter for the rail closure bend. Turning that off or on can be done at end one or end two independently, and that’s going to display this additional geometry that connects the top handrail element with the kneerail. So hopefully that video was of use in terms of providing context around the guardrail and walkway components by SAYFA.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any feedback or questions at all. Alternatively, there is the pdf Revit user guide that contains all of the critical information about the various SAYFA Revit components.