Pile caps. Not exactly something I normally deal with. I was asked the other day how would you create a family that has the piles included with the pile cap family but allows for the piles themselves to be adjusted based on the engineers specifications. If you’ve seen some of my families, you’d know I know how to make sub components orbit at my will.

To achieve the orbiting pile, I first place a reference arc as per my trench grate family, and then I hosted another reference arc to that. The second arc is what the pile cap is hosted to. This allows full orbiting of the pile, but of course if the data entered into the family is correct, everything should right way round and right side up, looking something like this:

In elevataion, the angle of the pile is adjusted as a ratio, in this instance I have used a ratio of 3:1. I then use trigonometry to convert the ratio to an angle that can be used by Revit to adjust the angle of the pile. In plan, the rotation is express as an angle.

All the piles adjust equally, however it wouldn’t be too hard to create 3 new sets of parameters if you needed to adjust each pile individually, just a bit more cumbersome to actually use.

Now, keeping in mind that I’m an MEP guy, you can download this concrete box with legs here.