Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Levels and Story Above

Listening to Bill's BIM Thoughts podcast with Carla Edwards and Paul Aubin (Session 29), Carla reminded me of a parameter associated with levels I wrote about in 2013 but it was buried within a post of a different title. So I decided to clip it out of that post and give it some air again.

Levels have a parameter called Story Above; and a related parameter called Building Story.


This is the current description for the Story Above parameter from Autodesk.

"From Revit Help"
Used in conjunction with the Building Story parameter when exporting to IFC with the export option Split walls and columns by story, this parameter indicates the next building story for the level.

By default, Story Above is the next highest level for which Building Story is enabled. To access a list of all building stories above the current one, click in the field. The Story Above does not need to be the next higher level or building story. If the selected level is deleted later or if Building Story is disabled, any levels with this level as their Story Above will revert to default behavior.
Unfortunately what Carla described about how it is used isn't entirely on track, sorry Carla. The first sentence in the help documentation description didn't include the information about IFC initially. It was revised at some point after the feature was introduced. The two parameters Building Story and Story Above only factor in if we export to IFC. They don't influence anything else. It might be useful if they did.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

So just stumbled upon these parameters today when setting up a job. I've researched them through Autodesk but it wasn't as helpful as I was wanting. Currently when we have a model with new and existing levels, we have to go away from our default "Level Above" setting for view range and put in a manual height based off Asso. Level. I was hoping this "Story Above" parameter would tell Revit which level is truly the "Level Above" and to ignore existing level that would be intersecting the zone between levels. I was going to test this later today after setting up this project, but thought I would ask since you said these parameters are just for exporting to IFC. Thanks!

Steve said...

Sorry, it is not going to affect any of your day to day work inside Revit. It just influences or turns on during the export to IFC process.

David said...

Thanks for clearing that up but is there a way to force Revit to see a specific level as the "Level Above"? We are working on a project with multiple buildings in the one model and each building has different levels. This means we cant us the "Level Above" in View Range within our templates as the physical next level above is displayed regardless of the building. Thanks

Unknown said...

Thanks Steve. After listening to the podcast, I'd been telling people the parameter controlled the level above behaviour. I swear I checked it but I can't get it to work now. That's disappointing!

Steve said...

David - Sorry I didn't respond earlier and the disappointing answer is no.

Matthew - Yep, it's just for IFC export of data, doesn't do anything inside Revit.

Anonymous said...

Good day,
Why isn't there an option to set the Story Above parameter to 'none'? How do we handle the highest level of a building when there are higher levels defined for an adjacent building in the same project?

Steve said...

Anonymous,

"Default" = "none"

If there are levels above it AND you assign a level instead then you're telling Revit there is a building story above. When it is set to default there isn't.

Inside Revit it doesn't matter at all. If you're exporting to IFC it turns on. Only the software being used to import the IFC data cares, if it does.

Anonymous said...

Thank you kindly Steve. Kudos! Yes, my intention was also to set it correctly for exporting to IFC.
Best,
Anonymous