Earlier this week a client contacted me and asked about how to control the position of the stick symbol in climbing beams (see image below). Now this actually has a very simple solution but this was something that I had never noticed before and hence I thought I would share the knowledge and the tip and trick! The model had a mono pitch roof with secondary beams that were set out parallel to the rafter’s top flange. See model below.
The problem arose in a course plan view as, by default, the symbolic lines are generated from the centre of the structural framing member and not the top plane. In the image below I have shown where the symbolic line should appear with the red reference planes and where the stick symbol is actually shown with default settings.
This obviously causes many issues with dimensioning and detailing of the structure as well as ambiguous results when adjacent beams with a differing section size are displayed in a seemingly different location!
Select your framing members and in the Properties Palette set the Stick Symbol Location to Top of Geometry. As you can see in the image below, the default setting is the centre of the member
.
Here is the before and after result. The shift is more pronounced on deeper sections but it does show the issue and the solution.
lawrenceH
Autodesk Revit Structure 