DaleSmith
2012-04-11, 10:34 AM
Hi everyone,
Sorry, this may be a vague question but it's one we've been wondering about at our company. We're wondering what people actually model component-wise when dealing with a pilecap and piled ground beam set up. We obviously model the pile caps as structural foundations, but it's the ground beams and pile's themselves where we seem to be struggling to reach a concencus. I've attached a few images of a fake project highlighting a few issues regarding these questions.
I tend to model the concrete ground beams as structural framing, which tends to allow neater joins and tidier details than isolated structural foundation do. However, then people at my work are questioning if this is ok since the beams aren't actually being modeled as foundations. Again, this doesn't seem to be an issue for me, they are working as beams after all, but people are wondering if this is still ok to do as part of the BIM process.
The piles we've tended to be using are face based structural foundation families. They are nested into the pile cap families, and are attached to the underside of the structural framing (ground beams). This allows the piles themselves to cut into the caps and beams with voids and create neater pocketed details, this is shown in the two section views provided. However, these can be hard to work with in their own ways:
* You can't copy piles accross from one beam to another, since they won't be able to maintain their connection to the orginial host.
* If you split the beam for some reason, then piles in the split off section of the beam lose their hosting and have to be deleted.
* They sometimes form strange conenctions to other items in the model seemingly unrelated. An example last week involved us being unable to move a ground beam due to a pile completely on the otherside of the building (which had no beams intesecting or even close to intersecting the beam we were trying to move).
The other option we have considered is just to use isolated foundations to model the piles, which aren't face based. These sit in the model much easier and luckily don't need deleting if changes are made to the ground beams (eg, needing to split them). However, you can't get the void pockets to apply to both ground beams and pile caps. You can get them to join and pocket nicely in the pile cap family, but unfortuantely they won't join/pocket to the structural framing due to the difference in family type. One solution to this is to change the piles to generic models, at which point they will happily join to both structural foundations and framing, but it would seem very odd to be modeling foundations as genereic models.
What do others do in these situations? Do you use face based families? Do you just model them as isolated foundations and ignore the fact you can't actually get the joins/pockets correct? Or is there a solution that allows best of both worlds? We want the piles in the pile caps to be the same families as those supporting the ground beams.
Like I said, sorry if this question is a bit unclear in places. But our company is pretty much self taught on Revit (other than basic starter lessons) with nobody with previous Revit experience employed to inform us how others tackle these problems. As a result I'm worried we are either slipping into bad habits, or maybe attempting to model too in depth, by making sure each pile is correctly pocketed etc.
Sorry, this may be a vague question but it's one we've been wondering about at our company. We're wondering what people actually model component-wise when dealing with a pilecap and piled ground beam set up. We obviously model the pile caps as structural foundations, but it's the ground beams and pile's themselves where we seem to be struggling to reach a concencus. I've attached a few images of a fake project highlighting a few issues regarding these questions.
I tend to model the concrete ground beams as structural framing, which tends to allow neater joins and tidier details than isolated structural foundation do. However, then people at my work are questioning if this is ok since the beams aren't actually being modeled as foundations. Again, this doesn't seem to be an issue for me, they are working as beams after all, but people are wondering if this is still ok to do as part of the BIM process.
The piles we've tended to be using are face based structural foundation families. They are nested into the pile cap families, and are attached to the underside of the structural framing (ground beams). This allows the piles themselves to cut into the caps and beams with voids and create neater pocketed details, this is shown in the two section views provided. However, these can be hard to work with in their own ways:
* You can't copy piles accross from one beam to another, since they won't be able to maintain their connection to the orginial host.
* If you split the beam for some reason, then piles in the split off section of the beam lose their hosting and have to be deleted.
* They sometimes form strange conenctions to other items in the model seemingly unrelated. An example last week involved us being unable to move a ground beam due to a pile completely on the otherside of the building (which had no beams intesecting or even close to intersecting the beam we were trying to move).
The other option we have considered is just to use isolated foundations to model the piles, which aren't face based. These sit in the model much easier and luckily don't need deleting if changes are made to the ground beams (eg, needing to split them). However, you can't get the void pockets to apply to both ground beams and pile caps. You can get them to join and pocket nicely in the pile cap family, but unfortuantely they won't join/pocket to the structural framing due to the difference in family type. One solution to this is to change the piles to generic models, at which point they will happily join to both structural foundations and framing, but it would seem very odd to be modeling foundations as genereic models.
What do others do in these situations? Do you use face based families? Do you just model them as isolated foundations and ignore the fact you can't actually get the joins/pockets correct? Or is there a solution that allows best of both worlds? We want the piles in the pile caps to be the same families as those supporting the ground beams.
Like I said, sorry if this question is a bit unclear in places. But our company is pretty much self taught on Revit (other than basic starter lessons) with nobody with previous Revit experience employed to inform us how others tackle these problems. As a result I'm worried we are either slipping into bad habits, or maybe attempting to model too in depth, by making sure each pile is correctly pocketed etc.