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Michael Wilson/3 min read

Creating Isolated Foundation for Structural Columns in Revit

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We can't add columns and not put a foundation below them.

We can't add columns and not put a foundation below them. When you look at it in 3D, and this will be helpful when we can cut sections as well, but it just looks kind of wimpy without something for this to sit on. And so what we'll do is we'll go to our structure tab and we're going to click isolated foundation here.

And then we need to load in the family. And so if you have the Imperial library loaded, then you can just click yes here. And then we're going to go into our library and we're going to look for structural foundations, and we want this rectangular footing.

Now, when you look at the type, this one's a 72 × 48. We're going to go for a square footing and a little deeper. We're going to change this.

We'll say edit type duplicate, and then change the type to 72 × 72 × 24 inches. So six feet by six feet by two feet deep and hit OK.

And then I'll change my parameters here. So two for the thickness and then make sure they're both six feet here. Now you may be asking, you know, why did we make a new type when we're clearly not using this anywhere else? And honestly, it's just because you need to form that habit to always be making a new type.

So it's better to have multiple types within a project than to override an existing one. Because you definitely don't want to form that habit of overriding those existing ones. So make sure we're on the right type here.

72 × 72 × 24 and hit OK. And then I'm going to jump over to level one and I have to reactivate this command and you'll see why we want to do that here in a second, but essentially making sure I got the right type set.

I can set my height offset to negative two, because that's how low we placed the columns. And then I can just say at grid intersections, just like we would have with our structural columns.

And then I pick all of the grid lines and then click finish. And it won't show any of these in the view because they're below level one. But if I were to go to my 3D view, you can see all of my footings have been created.