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Michael Wilson/3 min read

Setting Up the Elevator in Your Building Design

Elevator Placement Workflow

1

Pick Elevator Family

Hosted family with cab, doors, and shaft geometry.

2

Place at Each Floor

Family auto-replicates across levels.

3

Set Shaft Dimensions

Match manufacturer's required pit and overhead clearances.

4

Coordinate with Structure

Verify shaft openings in structural floors and roof.

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Now that we have the shaft all set up, the next step here is going to be to add the elevator.

Now that we have the shaft all set up, the next step here is going to be to add the elevator. This is the family that I downloaded from a manufacturer's website and included as part of the class dataset. We're going to do the same thing where we load a family and we're going to load it from our class folder.

Within here you'll see we've got the elevator family that we can download and load in. You can see we have the elevator family that we can load into our project. So I'll click Open to load that in.

Then I'll go to Architecture and Component, and this will allow me to place the elevator. It's going to look for a wall to host to.

You can see it's kind of trying to find that, and so the host element is the front wall, which is where our door is going to be, somewhere over here. So I'll just place it up against that wall.

Then this box that you see here is going to make up our hoistway. So I'll move it into the corner and we'll see how close we got. It looks like we did pretty well.

So it seems like it fits well. The door cuts itself open, and then we'll just take a look and see how it works on the rest of our project. Here's one of the fun parts about bringing in a manufacturer's elements: they design them for every project, not just yours.

So, you can see we've got an elevator that, instead of just two stories, goes up to what looks like maybe 10 or 11 stories. We'll want to adjust some of the parameters within this to make sure it doesn't go so many stops. What you'll want to do is select the elevator.

This is the daunting part of using downloaded content; when we look through the parameters, there is a ton of stuff to filter through. So I'll look for a number that's not a dimension here.

I found this one—this looks like the number of stops, and that looks like what we're looking for here. So my number of stops is not going to be 10.

It's going to be two because we're first floor, second floor. You can see that immediately starts to fix our issue. The next thing we're going to want to look at is a section through here to make sure that we have the height correct.

So I'll just cut a section that goes through the building this way and cuts through the elevator. Then we'll take a look at it. You can see here the stops that we have set up are at 14 feet.

The distance from stop one to stop two is set to 14 feet, and the distance from stop two to stop three is set to that as well. That works out for us pretty well because now we have our elevator that will stop at level two, and you can see it stops at the roof.

We've got much better parameters set in now, but you can see the whole thing is set up to draw many, many stops, but we've got it set the way we want now. We're in good shape. I'm going to save, and then we can take a look at continuing to refine the rest of our core.