Placing Footings and Slab on Grade in Revit Structure

Hello and welcome back to Revit Structure. In our previous video, we placed all of the footings for our major vertical structures. Now let's place footings for our walls.

First place we want to go to is Structure. Under Foundations, we want to go to Wall. Now over in the Properties box, we have a Bearing Footing 36" × 12".

Well, that's kind of small for what we need, so we are going to modify it. First thing we are going to do is rename it Bearing Footing 36" × 18". Now what we want to do is go to Foundation Thickness and change that to 1'-6".

We've set our footing depth—now we are ready to apply it to our model. What we want to do is zoom in a little, hover over the wall, and you’ll notice that the Revit program highlights the wall. This is because the footing is automatically placed at the base of the wall.

Okay, let's continue placing footings. You’ll notice that it places the footing continuously along the length of the wall. Where we don't need footings, let's not place them.

And where we do, let's continue. Since the program is automated in this manner, it saves us time and makes us more efficient. Let's take a 3D look at our model.

Let's rotate it to the underside, and let's escape out of this command. We see now we've placed all of our spread footings, grade beams, and continuous footings for our building. Okay, let's get out of this window.

Let's go back to our Foundation. Now that we've done that, what we want to do is place a slab-on-grade in our basement. So let's get started.

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Let's go again to Structure, to Floor. Let's pick Floor, and here in the Floor options, we have three different types of floors. These are not what we want. What we want is a 5" concrete slab-on-grade.

So let's pick this one, go to Edit Type, and create a new type of floor. Go to Duplicate and name this 1Concrete 5" Slab on Grade. Hit OK.

Now what we want to do is edit it for the materials and depth we need. Okay, as you see, we're in Structure—it's the function. And here's Material.

Let's pick that. Here we have a radio button that takes us to our materials. Let's go to Search, type in "concrete, " and it automatically gives us different items we can choose from.

Our concrete floor is going to be a normal weight concrete, 3,000 psi compressive strength. Let's pick that and hit OK. Now our depth is 5"—here it currently says ¾".

Let's change that to 5", hit OK, hit OK. Let's get started. There are a number of ways to place a floor.

I like to use the Pick Lines tool because it provides a more efficient way to create our floor outline. Okay, let's continue picking the perimeter of our floor.

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Sometimes you have to zoom in—you may end up with extraneous lines; just delete those. Go back to Pick Line and continue. Okay, let's go around and clean it up.

Here we have to clean the corners up a little bit because you cannot have intersecting or overlapping lines in a closed loop. That looks good—now go up to Modify | Create Floor Boundary and hit Finish Edit Mode. And here we have a 5" concrete slab.

Here we see the directional span of the slab. We don't really need this at the moment since it's a continuous slab. Let's just go ahead and hide it—we may need it at some point in time.

Okay. One other thing we need to do is create blockouts or joints for our slab when it cracks. For this slab-on-grade, we don't have to because it was poured after the concrete columns.

So, that should finish this video, and we'll see you in the next one.