Roof access hatches Revit instruction video

Video transcript

This video will cover the Revit content that us at IGS BIM Solutions have created for Kattsafe as part of their greater Revit library. And in this video, we’ll focus on the access hatches, which can be found on the Kattsafe website at the roof access hatches product page. And here you’ll see that we have the guardrail kits as well as the hinged and sliding variants of the roof access hatches.

So just jumping into Revit, you’ll see that we have this section of the virtual showroom file with all of the families, and the inherent types laid out. This file will easily let you copy and paste into your project, as well as serve as a bit of a QA file for interrogating the geometry and the back end metadata prior to bringing it into your projects.

So as mentioned, we have the hinged and sliding variants of the roof access hatches. These are broken up into two separate families. Within these families we have default family types for the corrugated deck and the tray deck flashing and for the sliding access hatch we have different size options, so the 1, the 1.2 and the 1.5 metre as well as those deck flashing variants there.

So there’s some additional options that we have when we’re placing these objects. And I’ll just quickly show the placement method for these is either place on face or place on work plane. So these are work plane based, which lets us specify if we want to place it on a face which is useful for if we have a roof with a slope that will ensure that the family dynamically adjusts its slope depending on the hosting face. When we place it onto, say, a roof element like this, what we can also do is use the in-built cut tool in Revit so that can be found under the modify tab, and if we just select the roof itself and then the access hatch, that will cut the necessary void out of the hosting element and allow us to very quickly document not only the access door itself, but the penetration through the roof. If we wanted to, we could easily swap this out for, say, a bigger version of the sliding hatch.

And you’ll notice that the cut that we made previously will dynamically adapt based on the family type selected. If at any point we would want to change this to a hinged version of the access hatch, that’s easily done. And again, that void will stay true to the size of the product if we have applied that cut geometry tool.

So there’s some options in terms of visibility here. In terms of sizing, the size is pretty much based on the type so there’s no real need to adjust any sizing as these are sort of suited to come as they are built. But what we would say is when you come to the visibility settings here, we have the ability to change the visibility of this hatch to showing the open or closed position, and that’s via this open roof hatch parameter which can be toggled on or off.

That does apply also obviously for the sliding variant where we can use that same parameter to show the sliding hatch door in the open position with the guardrail kit. You’ll notice that again, this is one single family being the Kattsafe access hatch guardrail kit but we have two types built in to represent the different mounting types. So this is the concrete mount and the metal deck mount.

So these can be placed to standalone items in a similar fashion using the place on face or place on work plane and you can orient that. Alternatively inside both the sliding and the hinged access hatch families there is the, under the visibility group, we have the guardrail kit tick box which can be activated to automatically show that shared component and oriented and positioned based on the centre of that void.

So what we can also do is using this guardrail kit type family selector, we’re able to swap that metal deck mount to the concrete mount and that’s going to dynamically change not only the geometry of the guardrail kit, but being a shared family that will ensure that the product code reflecting this actual concrete mount, which in this case is a GW394C will make its way into the schedules. The required spaces that we’re seeing here to show the extent of the doors in the open position as well as the guardrail kit required space

these can be toggled on or off with this required space tick box. So that is an instance based parameter which you’ll notice changes the appearance of that required space on this particular instance, but leaves all these on. Alternatively, in a view we can use the VB visibility graphics overrides coming down to specialty equipment, which is the category that these all live in.

We can toggle off the required space subcategory and that’s going to ensure that all of those required space clearance zones are deactivated in the specific view that we turn that subcategory off in. We also have the option to specify a vertical offset from the hosting face or work plane via this manufacturer height from FFL parameter. So if we wanted to have this sitting up on a some sort of base, we can enter a positive value here and that’s going to drive it up.

Something I should also mention is with that cut out into the hosting element, we would just need to make sure that this roof thickness equals the roof thickness of the actual roof element in this case. So if I were to change the thickness of this roof to, say 400, you’ll sort of very quickly see what happens here where we no longer get that void, because what we would need to do is change our roof thickness parameter within the actual access door family to 400 and that’s going to extend that void down and make sure we’re getting accurate penetrations going through the entirety of our hosting faces and elements. So as with all the other Kattsafe componentry, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Otherwise, we do have the associated PDF User Guide that goes along with all of the content in the Kattsafe library, so hopefully that can be of service to you.