Does any one model the trusses?

[erikbjur]

What are you engineers doing about trusses? I have been beating my head into the wall trying to create families that I can use for trusses. I know there are some out there but they all require me to enter the length manualy. Is there any out there that act like a structural beam. Families where I can draw the truss like a beam, with a start and end point. Does any out there have a truss family based on a structural beam? Thanks in advance.

[Tom Weir]

I do not know of any families that can do what you are asking. It has definately been a wish list item for awhile and I am hoping the next release might finally bring us the answer. Until then I guess you have to make your own family.

At least now you can rotate beam members.....before RS we could not even do that.

Tom Weir
Los Angeles

[david_peterson]

I'm not sure how well it would work, but you can model them in ADT. There's a "Curtain Wall" style on Adesks website that you can down load. The style takes the profile of the truss your are looking for and will space it for you @ what ever spacing you require. You do still have to draw the profile. It will get you the 3d info anyway.
I'm going to ask this question, just because I'm curious. Are you trying to model your truss to export it to be analyzed? Most builders I know just let the truss mfr's figure that stuff out. I think it'd be great if you could export the roof shape as a massing element to a program like Alpine, and have it return the actual truss profile, spacing, and locations. I'm not sure what good a family would do because there are so many different profiles you would need to create, unless you just a very basic gable end, 1 ridge line roofs. If you were to look at a hip end set, you may have 30 different profiles you need to draw. Then you still have the 2-ply girders and such.
Of course there is a possibility that you were talking about bar joists. I've heard some people refer to bar joist as "trusses". Those we have.

[erikbjur]

This is killing me because I can model every thing in my building except the dang trusses. I can even do the anchor bolts and rebar. And all of this is basically "Revit straight out of box". I guess I was hoping someone out there has figured out an ingenious way of showing the trusses with out drafting them in plan view and then drafting the same thing in the details and sections. I even thought about modeling all of the trusses as 1.5" walls and then attaching them to the roof. That way they would follow the profile of the underside of the roof. In section I would then have to show the detail components for the top and bottom chords. Factory, I know you guys are slammed with stuff to do. However, most residential projects have trusses. You already have a floor truss object. Now we need roof trusses. I don't need them for analysis, although if we could, I would do it. All I really need is a way to model them so they show up in plan view and then also in section. That is the Revit way to do things. "If it shows up in more than one view, model it." With the new building codes now, engineers are being required to show more information on the plans.

[kmarsh]

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/Imperial_Tutorial.pdf

This tutorial has a section on creating a truss type family (happens to be a wood truss) it's under Parametric Component Design Techniques.

Also, in the help file, there is an example of another type of truss family creation. Take a look at those and see if it's what you're looking for.

If not, could you clarify what it is that you're looking to do? I.E., what exactly do you want to be able to do?

[erikbjur]

In an ideal world...it would be great if I could draw the start and end of the truss and have it match the shape of the roof above. It would be even better if it would match the ceiling below. All I would have to do is model the roof object, ceiling object and then draw the start and end of the truss. The truss would then fit itself between the ceiling object and the roof object. Now back to reality....All I really need is to be able to efficiently draw the trusses and have them show up in section and in details. It would be cool if all I had to do was to draw the start and end of the truss, just like a structural beam, and the truss family would figure out how to draw the shape. I know I might need to have different types of trusses (standard, scissor, half, etc). Does that make sense? Forgive me if I am totally confusing.

[thnieves]

I figured I´m a little late on the tread, but I´ve only started using revit a few days ago.
Anyway I have the same problem with the trusses. I´m an architect in Brazil and around here we do a lot of complex roof structures and they are not usually coverd with ceilings, playing a big role on the overall building aesthetic. So far I´ve been doing those in AutoCad as shown on the attached images and I was wondering if I would be able to do the same in Revit.

[tiffany.amorgan]

The link for the wood truss tutorial has been moved does anyone know where it went?

[erikbjur]

Here are some truss families I made a while ago.

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=44849&highlight