Structural Beta

[tarch]

According to the Cadalyst's article (November issue), Beta version of Structural application was released. Does anybody have information how to get it?

Alek

[Chad Smith]

I heard about this yesterday at a Revit 7.0 product launch.
Apparently the future structural and HVAC enhancements will be separate programs that will interact with Revit through the exposed API. And no doubt they will come at an extra cost.

I've been meaning to contact my reseller about getting a hold of the beta too.

[dazza163968596]

And so it begins "API = money spinner for autodesk"
Autodesk: Hey we've got some great new tools for doing you heating & ventilation no more messing about with none intelligent generic ductwork families.
Revit User: Great will it be available in the next release
Autodesk: Yes! But its an add-on that will be another $250.
Revit User: We need it so I suppose we'll have to pay it.

"At least Dick Turpin had the courtesy to wear a mask when he was robbing you"

[Martin P]

Great, are we going to be left with what is there at the moment then. - ie beams snapping to column centres. I will not be paying to get rid of that. But it needs getting rid of. If the structural add on has this relationship it will be useless to us anyway. If it doesnt and Revit does - I will be more than a little bit p'd off.........

[Chad Smith]

If the pay for add-on story is true, then I guess it means us Reviteers can't use the phrase

"...but you have to pay for add-ons with ArchiCAD to get full use out of it. We can use Revit straight out of the box."

[GuyR]

add-on story is true

I'd wait for some factory comment, I think you're getting confused about what the structural addon will do.

Guy

[Martin P]

One problem can see if this is the case - will families have to be copyrighted? and will we end up with families that need an altered API to work in Revit models? seems like a real minefield......

[tarch]

I'd wait for some factory comment, I think you're getting confused about what the structural addon will do.

Guy
I participated in a survey couple of months ago and one of the questions was, will I be ready to pay $3,000 (I think the amount is right) for a structural module. That said, it looks like it's going to be a standalone package.

[Steve_Stafford]

I hope no one really thought that Autodesk would spend a couple years creating a structural engineering version of Revit and then give it away for free?

[sfaust]

the way I understood it (don't know it I'm right, and I'm just judging by what I read on the forums) it would be a standalone package. Architects continue to buy Revit, structural engineers buy Revit Structural instead. This is no different the the architect buying ADT and the MEP's buying building systems (except, of course, that the base program is much better ;))

[hand471037]

Autodesk: Yes! But its an add-on that will be another $250.
Revit User: We need it so I suppose we'll have to pay it.

"At least Dick Turpin had the courtesy to wear a mask when he was robbing you"

What did you really expect? You're surprised by this?!? Read your EULA. You have no rights. All your money does is pay for permission you use the software under Autodesk's terms. That's all you're ever buying with Commercial software. In essence, you're nothing more than a share-cropper, renting land to farm in the hopes that the income from what you can grow on the land will pay for the cost of it's rental.

Now, that's not nessarly a bad thing, when that land is really rich and easy to farm (Revit) and is owned by a landowner that has the resources to keep making it better (Autodesk).

But it's a very real problem if you've based your business off of a certain crop (i.e. rendering light studies with Lightscape) and the landowner (Autodesk) tells you that it's not going to let you use the Lightscape farm anymore, and now you have to grow this other crop (rendering using VIZ) instead.

If you're basing your livelihood completely off of sharecropping, i.e. commercial software, with Revit, Viz, AutoCAD, Microsoft Servers, MS Office, SketchUp, Photoshop, etc., then it is even more important to keep the fact in mind that you don't actually own any of these things, and are really at the mercy of the companies that do own them. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't, and I'm constantly amazed at how little most people and businesses really take these things into consideration.

Your only alternatives is to write your own CAD/BIM software, try to find an non-commercial open-source solution, or simply not use CAD/BIM at all and return to the drawing boards. Complaining about a deal that you agreed to is silly.

[BillyGrey]

To those of us who have actually paid for the software, I hope no one actually thinks any of us feel as if we have gotten anything for free...In fact, we will continue to pay, and pay a premium for new seats and subscriptions. The business model to date has been to add features to Revit, not spin them off...

Additionally, I think that enhancements should be made to the base package in the area of MEP.
At a minimum, enhancements should be provided to MEP. I'd just hate to see some basic enhancements that we have all been wishing/waiting for get spun into another version.

[Tom Weir]

Yo,
As a structural guy I expect to see mostly structural, but with enough architectural features to help me get by. I could really do with less room tags and less window and door stuff and the like....

I have been using the structural beta 7.0 for about a month and am definately finding a lot of enhancements that I can use. Some are obvious, many are not, just tweaks here and there. Not every thing is solved yet. But talk is that release 8.0 is not that far off in the future and we will see even more improvement, and the structural product.

So stay tuned...

[MikeJarosz]

Just how Autodesk is going to bundle structural and mechanical remains to been seen. I think many architectural users won't be interested in having them because they hire outside consultants to do the engineering.

Architects WILL be interested in the ability to link the engineer's work back into their own Revit model for interference checking. So I think it is plausible that the engineers will go for the extra cost, especially if the program itself is good. If the main Revit program is any indication, the engineering modules will be just as revolutionary and worth every penny.

This is roughly the process we have been using on the Freedom Tower. We get Revit files from Cantor Seinuk (structural) and JB&B (MEPF). They have been drawn in plain vanilla Revit, but we link their work into ours and find all the interferences.

Once Revit can do all the calcs, then the fun starts.

Of course, if you are a single practitioner and you do your own MEP, then an add on might be a worthwhile investment.

It costs money to do business.

[hand471037]

It costs money to do business.

Totally. Not saying that commercial software is a bad thing at all, just that I think people need to better understand in general what's really going on in regards to commercial software. Both Open Source and Commercial Closed Source software have their advantages and disadvantages and costs. I just wish I saw more understanding in regards to that within our industry. :)

[rhys]

Great, are we going to be left with what is there at the moment then. - ie beams snapping to column centres. I will not be paying to get rid of that. But it needs getting rid of. If the structural add on has this relationship it will be useless to us anyway. If it doesnt and Revit does - I will be more than a little bit p'd off.........
I'm all for a Structural product that will draw in more Structural engineers with a stand alone product with all the API hooks to analysis software that many currently use. I'm sure that the column/beam snapping issue can/will be solved by the factory for both disciplines. We just need to push it up the wishlist. Can't believe the engineers will want the current behaviour anyway.

[dazza163968596]

We are a small developers. So we end up doing all the drawings based on sketches & calcs from our Architect, Engineer & Mechanical consultants. We take the survey ad the building model based on the outline info provided we only really get hand drawn sketches & calcs, we have to coordinate the whole job in Revit. If we are going to have to start paying for add-ons we are simply not going to be able to afford to continue using it. Especially as each add-on would probably have to be purchased for each seat.

The whole point of us buying Revit in the first place was that we could use this as a coordination tool as our Architect & consultants are small one man practices who don't have the resources to produce detailed drawings. So I work closely with them from when we have purchased the land and had it surveyed. I can quickly work up all the architects ideas & options for various site layouts so that these can quickly be evaluated & distributed to our other consultants, there feed back can be incorporated from their sketches into the model. This way we get an accurate up to dated model from which all the construction work can be based.

My point is that it is small developers like us that do small housing developments & some industrial unit / Office development work that need Revit to develop and give us the capability to add more intelligent content to our model so that we can better coordinate the work from our consultants. Revit has already stretched our I.T. budget to its limit, there is no more money for add-ons isn't our subscription at £400 a year enough to fund the future development. If Revit does have an API (which would be great if it speeds development of extra features) Autodesk should incorporate these third party tools and add them into the new releases and use some of the subscription money to fund this development.

On a side note. We could real do with another seat of Revit for our project manager (Ex-designer who did the Revit training when I did) so that he can update projects in the construction phase an to help me out when projects clash. However, as he would not be using Revit for any length of time and it will just be sat there for the majority of the working week, we cannot justify spending the additional £3000 on another seat, we could justify paying an extra subscription at £400. I think that extra seats should purchased using the subscription method perhaps with a 5 year tie in or something similar, so that Autodesk has a guaranteed revenue stream to put towards continued development of what is a truly excellent product.

[PeterJ]

I think you are missing the point slightly, Dazza.

The idea, as I understand it, is not to prevent you working with structural families, showing their locations, scheduling them off, showing connection types etc.. With the type of projects that you describe that is what I would expect you to go on doing, you will still be able to co-ordinate with your engineer's hand annotated sketches or whatever he provides by way of layout, calcs and fabrication detail.

What the Structural package, I believe, will offer, based on some postings here and some feedback from people at AU is a method for Structural Engineers have other means of interrogating the model than we have at present - say specific view types or templates, maybe slightly different scheduling tools, a UI that targets the tools they will use frequently and perhaps leaves the other stuff like rendering, walkthroughs and site tools out. The pay off for the slightly different targeted functionality and perhapsa reduced feature set in comparison to the architectural tool, will be a two-way conduit to a single (or a range) of engineering analysis tools such as StruCAD or X-steel so that frame structures, complex loadings of difficult to prove existing conditions and so on can all be spit out worked over in the software they are familiar with and then incorporated back into the Revit model.

The core model will not be any different. Not all projects will warrant a full scale analysis, though some may get closer attention than they do at present.

Yesterday I sat in a meeting on a project with something like 200 columns, made more complex by the fact that some of these are a 203 UC at base a 152 UC at first to second and a 100 RHS at high level. I dread to think how many beams there are in the structure but I have my model and spit out AutoCAD drawings for the engineer, he feeds the 2D plans into his analysis package and does the extra work to make it think in 3D carryies out the analysis (or some of the time he just works it out by hand), gets the drawings back into AutoCADS format, tidies them up and then sits around a table with me looking at details, column locations and so on. With one model, by me, passed to him, interrogated in Revit structural, just so he knows what he is looking at, adjusted by his analysis package and passed back into Revit we will see a major productivity gain in this cycle. That's why an engineer would be willing to spend 3K or more on the software and why I would be willing to share my data more openly with him.

No doubt there is much that a non-engineer like myself is glossing over but you can see that on certain projects a structural Revit package will have great benefits and on other projects there will be no imperative for a structural engineer to use the package.

[dazza163968596]

Thanks for you considered reply. I totally agree that the API would be great if it is used the way you describe. However, it will only take some bright exec at Autodesk to say to the board "In the next release we've got some great new tools for XXXXXX. Our architectural users have repeatedly asked for this to be improved. Let's release it under the name of "Revit land tools" or "Revit Framing Tools" or "Revit HVAC Tools" and sell them at $500 each". I think that this is not beyond the realms of probability.

[davidwlight]

Let's release it under the name of "Revit land tools" or "Revit Framing Tools" or "Revit HVAC Tools" and sell them at $500 each". I think that this is not beyond the realms of probability.
Hi, I understand your concerns, but remember, Autodesk are trying to create Revit as a complete design platform, which allows all design professional who buy into the Revit product, to exchange design data seamlessly, hopefully saving time, money & making you more efficient! Data exchange today causes many design pros. all sorts of problems, which ultimately costs money.
Much like yourself, we are a small to medium size design practice that uses Revit; we understand its short falls, but know how to address these. Yes it would be great to have all sorts of extra features in one package, but how many would you actually use on a day to day basis? If we have to pay extra for specialist products, personally its money well spent. Remember if you buy ADT, you don’t get any civils features, you need to but Civils 3d instead.

[jarod.tulanowski]

I totally agree, I think that the releases will be more productive if they are broken up. Yea I know nobody likes to pay more for a program, but really if this means that they can be more productive on the different applications. (Revit building, Revit structural, etc...) Than I give it two thumbs up!!. Just my two cents worth my

[GuyR]

This is roughly the process we have been using on the Freedom Tower. We get Revit files from Cantor Seinuk (structural) and JB&B (MEPF). They have been drawn in plain vanilla Revit, but we link their work into ours and find all the interferences.

Mike, we are about to do this on a project and were wondering how to do this. So you' aren't using worksets for structural/MEPF but linked .rvt files? Can I ask:

Do you replicate grids in the arch and struct models?
Are floors/walls etc in the architectural model or the linked structural model?

Are there any other issues? In our case the structural and MEPF firms are in a different city to the architectural so workset syncing doesn't seem to be an option.

Guy

[noah]

Why not allow subscription holders to have use of a structural add-on under the same license they already have? For instance, we are a small firm of 3 working off 1 license that we share with the network install. We do most of our structural in-house. We could probably continue to operate with a single license of Revit and coordinate when one person has the structural program open and another has the main revit open. If we run into problems we simply buy a new license so 3 people can run 2 different programs sharing just 2 licenses. We would have the added benefit that 2 people could be in the main Revit at the same time OR 1 in Revit and 1 in structural.

If we have to pay another $3000+ for structural we wouldn't do it. It would go unused most of the time (CD's are increasingly becoming a smaller portion of the total design time thanks to Revit). But if we can leverage that license as a second Revit Arch. it would work well for us.

[Joef]

The question still remains : will the problems with the structural elements in Revit be fixed or will we be told: "If you want a structural program buy Revit Structural". Reviters are a very loyal group and I count myself among them, but I have been using Autodesk products long enough to be suspicious. If Revit developed a structural package and added it to the base Revit, they would not be "giving it away", that is precisely what we are paying a subscription fee for. I for one expect that there will be some improvement to the structural tools in Revit, but time will tell.

[nmangon]

If some of you went to AU, you probably saw a preview of Revit Structure (not Structural)
What was said as AU is that Revit Structure is a product for structural engineers. It will improve their productivity with dedicated tools, dedicated UI and dedicated content. It will be able to interact with structural analysis software with its API. Revit Structure will also improve coordination between architects and engineers.

Revit and Revit Structure will also share the same database so no interoperability problems.
If you are a structural engineering firm using Revit today, you will be able to cross grade to Revit Structure that will have more functionalities in term of structural engineering than Revit for architects.

If you are an architect using Revit, you can keep it and it will get more functionalities in term of structural modeling and you will be able to work with your consultants that use Revit Structure.

For the time being we accept only structural engineering firms as beta testers and if you are interested, please contact me at nicolas.mangon@autodesk.com

[Scott D Davis]

Nicolas,

Thank you for posting and helping to clarify Revit Structure. For those of you who don't know, Nicolas is the Revit Structures Product Chair (I think that's your title, right Nicolas?)

Hopefully, some of you structural engineers out there will contact Nicolas and become beta testers!

Looking forward to seeing what you have been working on Nicolas!

[BillyGrey]

If you are an architect using Revit, you can keep it and it will get more functionalities in term of structural modeling and you will be able to work with your consultants that use Revit Structure.

This is a promising statement indeed. I personally have not delved deeply into the structural toolsets of Revit as of yet, specifically because of the nagging issues I have seen discussed here. I simply have no time for tweeks and workabouts. Until then, it's all 2d for me.

Waiting patiently for the day,

Bill

[Arnel Aguel]

If some of you went to AU, you probably saw a preview of Revit Structure (not Structural)
What was said as AU is that Revit Structure is a product for structural engineers. It will improve their productivity with dedicated tools, dedicated UI and dedicated content. It will be able to interact with structural analysis software with its API. Revit Structure will also improve coordination between architects and engineers.
Will this Revit Structure functions somewhat like X-steel now called Tekla Structures where you can do the model of the structural framing be it steel or conrete plus all the necessary details for the connections of steel frame and details of rebars for concrete?

http://www.tekla.com/user_nf/default.asp?root_id=12847&ala_id=12848&mode=readdoc&r=12848&site=33

[aaronrumple]

If some of you went to AU, you probably saw a preview of Revit Structure (not Structural)
What was said as AU is that Revit Structure is a product for structural engineers. It will improve their productivity with dedicated tools, dedicated UI and dedicated content. It will be able to interact with structural analysis software with its API. Revit Structure will also improve coordination between architects and engineers.

If you are an architect using Revit, you can keep it and it will get more functionalities in term of structural modeling and you will be able to work with your consultants that use Revit Structure.


I'm not sure I'll be better off or not. Right now I'm using structural tools - not because we are doing the structural design, but because I need to coordinate and detail the project. In my last project the structure was being done in AutoCAD. This will continue as there are many good structural and detailing packages in use. So I get a rather dumb AutoCAD file. But I need to get some of the steel in my design. I tend to do this with structural members rather than detail components so I can cut sections wherever needed. The last project we laid out all the joists, major trusses and beams. Since this was an exposed structure, I needed the information for the rendering. So I don't see all the engineers we use sending me nice neat Revit files anytime soon. All of that is a real pita with the current structural tools. If I still have to replicate structure with a limited toolset - I'm not sure I'll be any better off than I am now.

Sure I don't need analysis tools for most projects. But I do need to be able to work with steel shapes and detail steel and architectural steel. As it is often aesthetic as well as structural.

Our firm also faces additional challenges down the road - we have in-house MEP, a Construction Services Division and we're doing more design build. The arch. dept. is the one doing the take offs. If we have to have separate packages to schedule MEP/Structural and Arch. - it ain't going to be pretty.

[mmodernc]

What happens when the structural detail is the basis of the aesthetics of a project? And some of the ugliest oversights are AC ductwork and equipment.
One of the serious motivations for going for Rexit was that eventually the subscription would provide a fully comprehensive product. This in may ways was an axt of faith.

[Kirky]

Wouldn’t it make more sense that the only difference between Revit and Revit Structural would be only the API interface (not the tools) that the engineer uses for special structural analysis by other software? I don’t think it is likely you will get your engineer to provide a structural model of say a house design. Rather it is more likely the Architect will send them the schematic structural model to the engineer for analysis, make the necessary corrections and send it back. This solves the problem that we don’t really expect engineers to model things, do we? :-)