BIM & BEAM

Connecting Design to Analysis with Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis Professional

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Enhanced Parts in Autodesk Revit 2013

Part elements in Revit support the construction modeling process by letting you divide certain elements from the design intent model into discrete parts. These parts, and any smaller parts derived from them, can be independently scheduled, tagged, filtered, and exported. Parts can be used by construction modelers to plan delivery and installation of pieces of more complex Revit elements.

Autodesk Revit 2013 extends the capabilities to support construction modeling by allowing further customization in parts.  Parts can now be merged, exclude, and restore.  Two or more parts can be merged into a single part, excludes will removes parts from the project, and lastly, you can restore parts that was previously excluded at any time.
You can divide parts with parametric gap offset, as well as a new type of profile family that allows you to create your own custom division profiles to illustrate more accurately how the building is constructed.


Parts enable more flexibility by supporting linked model with capability of object splitting and manipulation.  Additional elements such as structural beams and columns can now create parts as well.

Enhancements to parts enable more accurate insight on how the building may be constructed by working with multi-disciplinary design models.

Greater control over the analytical model in Autodesk Revit 2013

Analytical floors, analytical foundation slabs, and analytical walls now have corner analytical nodes in Analytical Edit mode. If you select the analytical model of floors or foundation slabs, you will see controls posted at all corners and edges which allow direct manipulation of the analytical model. You may select individual edges by using the Tab key while hovering over an edge. Pressing the spacebar will cycle through edge local and global drag widget arrow orientations.

New structural content for Revit Structure is available

Dear Revit Structure users,

We have just uploaded some new country specific, structural .rfa content and templates in the Subscription Center for you to download.

The delivery inludes content for Brazil, Russia and Spain.

The Content Pack provides structural engineers with access to additional content and families based on respective market requirements helping structural engineers to streamline the design and analysis process and access the components they need.  

Please log into the Subscription Center in order to access the new content libraries.

Your feedback will be well appreciated

regards

Pawel

Revit Structure online survey on join and cut concrete elements

Autodesk is conducting some user research to improve Autodesk Revit Structure.  The goal is to understand your needs and your workflow better.  Specifically, we are focusing on building elements that you might represent in concrete formwork drawings for cast-in-place monolithic construction.  These elements may need to be joined.

 
This survey will take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete. The link to the online survey is:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RevitStructureJoinGeometry

The information from this survey will be used only by the Revit product team. Your involvement helps make our products better fit your needs.  Please complete the survey by the end of Monday, October 3rd, 2011.

Thank you,

David Aurelio

david.aurelio@autodesk.com

Autodesk User Researcher

Tips for Managing your Revit Structure 2012 Analytical Model

The Autodesk Team over at the Revit Clinic Blog have been creating some excellent guides for helping you to better utilize the capabilities of Revit Structure 2012.  They've created a new post which provides some excellent tips and guidance for better managing your analytical models.

One of their latest posts is titled "The 2012 Analytical Model and Upgraded Files: Start and End Display" 

Check out the Revit this post and more at The Revit Clinic

 

WSP Asia creates excellent Revit Structure training material

WSP Asia is a multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy that offers services throughout the Asia region.
WSP prides itself with being a pioneer in Building Information Modeling (BIM) as it relates to structural engineering.  WSP has recently completed some outstanding Revit Structure training material which they have made available for download on their website.

You can access this training material as well as read more about WSP Asia by checking out their website at http://www.wspgroup.com/en/Welcome-to-WSP-Asia/Services-Asia/Services-container-Asia/Building_information_model/

The 2 training modules can be located at the bottom of the page.

New Autodesk Structures Blog for France!

The Autodesk Structural team in France has announced the availability of a new Blog focussed on Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Structural Engineering.  This site will provide our French speaking customers an area to read more about the power of Autodesk Revit Structure, Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis and AutoCAD Structural Detailling.

The authors for this blog are are Alexandre Mihalache, Olivier Bayle, Stéphane Balmain and Emmanuel Lagardette

You can check out the new blogsite by clicking here! Structure BIM

 Here is a screenshot of the blog which is a great addition to our Autodesk Structural BIM Community. 

 
 

Using the Revit Extensions for Steel Framed Floor Design and Analysis

We have a new whitepaper created by David Odeh of Odeh Engineers out of North Providence Rhode Island.

This white paper explores two new Autodesk® Revit® Structure 2011 Extensions for steel framed floor system design and analysis: the Composite Design Extension and the Vibrations Analysis Extension. These tools enable the engineer to analyze and optimize steel member sizes, evaluate floor vibrations, and directly populate the Revit Structure model with calculated design information. Specific applications of the extensions include: conceptual review of floor framing options, detailed design of new steel framed floors, and analysis of existing floor systems.

The white paper can downloaded here: Revit Extensions for Steel Framed Floor Design and Analysis

Excellent Linework Tip for Revit Structure Users

Special thanks to Erik Snell for this excellent Revit Structure Tip!

Linework Tip

The linework tool lives here on the Modify Tab in 2011 (similar for 2010).

 

 

The tool simply allows you to change the view specific style of a model edges (cut or projection) to a line style different than the one assigned to the category.  Common uses may be to increase the weight of specific lines or eliminate them by choosing the style <Invisible Lines>.  To set a line back to its default you choose <By Category>.

A neat trick first proposed by the developer that implemented the tool way back in the day is to use the linework tool on lines from other views displayed via underlay.  This made it easy to add a roof outline to a plan view as demonstrated in this blog post on Inside the Factory. We can take that same tip and twist it for a common structural case of displaying non-bearing walls in plan views.  Let me try to demonstrate on this overly simplified model.

 

Here we have four bearing walls, in blue, with non-bearing walls above and below, in grey. Note that these non-bearing walls are not visible in the structural plan view.

In the Level 2 view I'll set the view underlay property to Level 2 so I can see the wall above. The underlay view does not follow the view discipline property, which in this case is a good thing.

  

The lines from the wall above are now displayed.  Using the linework tool set the line style to <Overhead> and click each of the wall lines.

 

This will cause the edges to appear in the overhead style (dashed).  Next turn off the Level 2 underlay and note that the view specific line work remains.  The line work is not just visible but is still referencing the original edges even though they are not displayed.  When an edit affects the walls the overhead lines will adjust automatically.

 

Now you can repeat the same method to display the wall below. This wall will be displayed in the underlay of Level 1.

Be aware that these lines are a representation of the actual wall. If you select these new lines you will actually be selecting the wall element. To remove these lines do not delete them, this will delete the wall. You must reuse the linework tool with a setting of <By Category>.

As you can see from this post and its reference, on Inside the Factory, the linework tool can be used for many different use cases. Please share your experiences.

Cheers,

Erik Snell

 

Erik Snell is a product designer working on the Revit platform and specifically Revit Structure. Erik is a registered professional engineer and has been with Autodesk since 2005.

Content from Inside the Factory has been used by permission.