Structural Detailing

[William Troeak]

Last night I had a person from industry visit my Revit Architecture class and ask me if I knew of any one that could help train there office in Revit. Right away I thought sure me and Phil could do it (Phil is my TA, soon to be fellow instructor) but then as the conversation continued I realized with out telling her that Revit may not be what they need.

The company is a metal fabrication company that details and builds steel stairs, structural steel framing and other steel type construction.

Not wanting to discourage them I told her that I would look in to it for her.

So the question is: What is the best program for 3D Steel Shop drawings, and more specifically Steel Stair Drawings?

Any input would help.

[david_peterson]

3d Structural Shops in the US are generally produced using something like Tekla Structures or SDS/2 or StruCad ($20-25K price range, I could be off). If it's a small shop, I'd suggest they just stick with what they know. If they use Acad right now and they want to go 3d, the bigger question would be what type of engineering software do they use? There's a ton of them out there. None of them have perfect links back to Revit yet. Ram is getting closer day by day, but still isn't perfectly back and forth seamless (IMHO). I don't know of any that are. I guess Robobat is, but I'm not sure Adesk has the up to snuff yet for US codes.
As a structural guy myself, I really don't like the fact that I can't move/rotate object by UCS input. I know in 3d space where it needs to be and Revit doesn't always seem to put the object where I need them. This is why I might suggest ACA but that's just me. Plus with trim planes, it's almost easier than that Revit. IMHO Detailing Structural in Revit isn't that easy. And if you want to get in to the LOD described in AIA E-202 (The bim doc, I might have the wrong name there) I don't think you can do large, fully detailed projects in Revit. File size just gets to big.
Tekla and SDS/2 type programs, were designed and built to handle that level of detail (ie 3d Connections). I'm not going to say that you can't do it in Revit, but I don't know of a workstation that can handle it for under say $10k, you'll need more that 16 gigs of ram IMHO if you wanted to do it. If you want to use the ASD portion of RS, you can only go one way and you're still detailing in cad.
Just a few points from my perspective.

[William Troeak]

Thanks for the information. It seems that they are being pushed into Revit, even though it does not make to much sense....

[Scott Womack]

I know from a lot of perspectives, that it may not make the most sense. However, and a practicing project manager, I know that if I find a revit family of a product, I am more likely to use that as the basis of design, and ensure they are listed in my specifications. (For this discussion, I'm ignoring the potential quality issues of a manufacturer's families). Thus, if a number of the architectural, engineering, or contracting clients are constantly bombarding them with requests for Revit Families, then the marketing/survival alone may dictate the change.

Several Departments of Higher Education (state agencies that "run" state universities) are requiring that their funded projects have all three disciplines delivered in BIM. This is creating added pressure on manufacturers to provide BIM content. New York has gone this way, and from our sources, Texas, Oregon, and Illinois are going to follow suite.