Every Revit user has probably experienced this at some point. you need to make a custom railing, but have no idea how the tools actually work. You can draw it no problem in 2D, in ACAD, with your hand, but putting it in Revit seems like a daunting task for anything besides a simple railing. Lets be honest, the railing tools in revit are rudimentary and don't lend themselves well to other designs that don't involve vertical pickets or horizontal bars.
Want to do custom shapes, designs, infill patterns, spacing on ballusters? Unless you have an intimate understanding of how the tools work and what all the fields mean, you are probably in for some frustration as a seemingly simple adjustment on spacing in the dialogue box sends your railing spacing into oblivian.
One trick that I have picked up over the years is creating a custom railing family. This revit file contains all different kinds of railings all lined up, both is a flat plan configuration as well as on stairways. Things like custom start and end ballusters that return to the walls, glass infill panels, or other crazy and wierd shapes you may create as a custom railing for a project.
Every time you make a customized railing for a project, (which you may not every time as you may use just a standar 'handrail' or industrial 'guardrail' in your project), add that railing to this file. Over time this railing file will grow with all sorts of custom configurations that you used on all sorts of projects. Eventually as you are working on a project and go to draw a railing you will realize that you have drawn it before and can simply go to the project and copy|paste out of it, or you can use 'Transfer Project Standards', but this will bring in every railing family, so the bigger your railing file is, the less of a viable option this is.
Railings are teadious and hard to create and usually involve some frustration in their creation, so why experience this a second time? Save your work and use it in the future. Maybe you will use the exact same railing, maybe you will be able to make some minor modifications to one, either way saving your work will save you time in the future.
I am lucky enough to be one of the few people I know that am comfortable creating railings within Revit. This has mainly been due to clients and employers that really wanted something specific modeled to use in 3D renderings and views and such, so I have spent a lot of time working with the tools and understanding the relationships betwee different dialogue boxes within a railing type as well as tips and tricks I have piked up over the years to assist. Stay tuned, I can share these experiences.
