One of my many tasks this year has been to put together a working standard for Revit Structure that meets the graphical requirements of producing drawings to current UK standards. This has entailed creating many new tag styles and I thought I would share a recent instance of trying to produce an intelligent tag to report on slab thickness.
Previously I have been adding the slab thickness as a dumb attribute by using a shared parameter but recently stumbled across the idea of nesting in a floor based family and using a reporting parameter.
So how is this tag created? Well I will take you through the steps required. This method would work for any faced based family that you wanted to tag so could likely have many uses.
- Create a new family using the Metric Generic Floor Based family. Look at the floor in elevation and add the following parameter. Make sure that you add the dimension between the floor faces and not to the level or reference planes otherwise this will not work as expected.
2. The label just needs to be a normal Family Parameter but needs to be set as an instance parameter and have the Reporting Parameter checkbox ticked. This is how the slabs thickness is passed to the annotation family that we will create later.
Your Metric Generic Floor based family should now look as follows.
3. Save this family as UK_Slab_Thickness.
4. Start a new Generic Annotation Family and create a new label for the Slab Thickness annotation as shown below.
Make sure that you delete the default text that is present on the Generic Annotation family and then add your Label. You can, if you require, add the span direction symbol to this family. I have added the graphics and visibility controls for a one-way span and two-way span which further increases the productivity when annotating slabs.
5. Save the Annotation Family as UK_Slab_Thickness_Annotation and then load this family into the UK_Slab Thickness family (Metric Generic Floor Based Family). You now link the parameter so the annotation family can read the reporting parameter. Select the Annotation and then associate the Family Parameter as shown below.
Save the family and then load this into your project. Please note that you will have to use the Place Component tool to create the ‘tag’.
That’s it! Enjoy and hopefully you will find this useful and can all follow the steps required.
LawrenceH
Autodesk Revit Structure 
Thanks Lawrenceh.
This was a very helpfull tip !
Greetings from Belgium.
fantastic, this will be very useful for us
Thanks and God bless
Lawrence, how would you recommend dealing with an interior slab thickening that runs diagonally?
Hi Edwin,
I would use an in place family if there is only a single thickening. I the slab has a number of similar thickenings then I would create a concrete beam family and use this. You can add a type mark to the beam to enable you to filter this out of normal beam schedules.
The second method is a little cleaner and also keeps the file size down to a controllable limit.
Thanks Lawrence for the tips, this wil help me a lot for my first BIM project.
anyone figure out how to have a parameter for “top of elevation” for concrete grade beams and isolated foundations?
Lawrence, I need to place also a Name for each Slab, which I put in either Comments or Description Fields is it possible to have both this name and thickness in this generic annotation? THANKS!
Create a span direction annotation. add a shared “depth” parameter in a label and a Type Name label
Add the depth parameter as a project parameter to Floors (make it type, not instance.
edit your floor types and set “depth” to the floor depth.
(if you change the construction of the type, you will have to edit the parameter.
This family ends up as a point support when model is transferred to Robot, do you have any workaround for this?
Hi, I have checked this using Revit 2014 and Robot Structural Analysis Professional 2014 and I am not getting the same issue, the family that I used for the tag is just a generic model which does not contain analytical properties.
I know it has been a while, but I found this method pretty straightforward. I am just having problems when incorporating the span direction symbol. Do I add it in the UK_Slab_Thickness_Annotation family or UK_Slab_Thickness family? How do I incorporate such family to this family I am creating? Best regards