Here’s an interesting one for all you guys that work with concrete. Last week I was working with one of our customers on a project involving a large concrete structure. Most of the beams are cast in situ and the slabs are circular in shape. We faced the following problem below due to the limitations of not being able to cut Cast in Situ members with a ref plane! You guessed it, the beam needed to match and blend into the outer profile of the slab. As you can see from the image below, the top half of the beam is proud and the bottom half is too short.

I did manage to come up with a work around for the annoying problem that involves a bit of family editing and filtering. First, I created a copy of the concrete beam family file and then added an Object Style called Setout and set a thick Line Weight and a bright colour and added the beam elements to this Object Style. I used an Object style to make it easy to control the visibility in the model and drawings.

The next stage is to draw the newly created beam around the edge of the slab making sure you have justified it to side1 or side2. This will force the intersecting beams to merge into the setting out beam.

You can then either manually switch off the category ‘setout’ in the visibility graphics override or create a view template and apply this to all the plans, elevations and sections that you have in the project. Also you can add a filter to the schedules to omit these beams. The only ‘fly in the ointment’ is that the graphics on the cut members do not show a capping surface but overall this works very well.