Revit & Timber structures

[drafting.82475]

Hello All,

I am the cad manager for a structural engineering company that is big on Timber & Light Gage construction. We are currently using AutoCAD 2006.
A little over a year ago, we added a concrete division and since then, I have been looking into the Revit series as something we will need use into in the future. Recently I received a demo copy of the latest Revit Structure from our Autodesk reseller. While navigating through the software and running the examples, I realize that the software is very limited on Timber/Light Gage Steel. Although I am loving the software and I can see it being used on our concrete division, I know I would not be able to justify a move/migration to the Revit “platform”, if I can’t apply it to our strongest area (Timber), at least for the Multi Family division where we have a lot of jobs that combine Timber super structure over concrete podium.
I will appreciate if any of you currently using the software can give me some ideas and provide some advice on Revit.
Thank you all in advance for any replies to this post.

Jaime

___________________
Jaime Silva
Gouvis Consulting Group
Cad Manager

[erikbjur]

Most of what we do is timber. I'm not sure how much detail you want to model but every thing has worked great on our end. Trusses are the only thing I have not found a suitable solution to.

[erikbjur]

Let me know where you run into snags and I would be happy to help you.

[cameron.52045]

Hi, Same question really - just wondering if Revit is the tool to do this kind of work.

Post & Beam timber frames with tapers, bends, bent tapers, notches, compound cuts etc... it all needs to be schedule-able....

Any views would be most welcome...... Cheers, Cameron

[Paul Andersen]

Hey Cameron, For the basic members with notches one approach would be to use the delivered wood families and cut the notches with other members or voids. You can also trim exposed ends with a ref plane and the cut geometry tool. For the tapered members I attached a couple of really quick and sloppy examples. Two are only tapered along the curve (1 extrusion drawn in elevation and 1 sweep with 2 void sweeps cutting the taper) the third is tapered in both directions (an extruded member with 2 voids to cut the other taper). There are a few other ways I could think of to tackle this along similar lines. To take these in place members a step further you could make a family with parameters that could control dimensions of the member and the voids to obtain several different profiles with varying degrees of taper. I guess it depends how many different types you use and how often you use them as to whether or not you would want to handle them in place or not. With regards to scheduling that shouldn't be a problem. I've yet to come across something that I wanted to schedule and couldn't. I'm sure there are several other ways to attack this and I don't work with wood that often so I can't speak directly to any pitfalls that may occur from the methods I've outlined. Good luck and welcome to AUGI.

[david_peterson]

Paul,

for a true tapered beam, wouldn't a family style with a blend work better? vs all the tapered voids?
Just a thought

[Paul Andersen]

I could see using the blend for the voids that cut the member. Might be easier to make parametric since you could control the angle of the cutting void by adjusting parameters that would change the profile of the top and bottom blend. This way you wouldn't need an angle parameter to rotate the void extrusions as you would in my double taper example. Is this what you mean? It would be nice if the the blend tool could follow a curved path though. No voids would be necessary for a double taper then. I think there are several ways to accomplish this one and I'm sure that my examples are rather crude but I slapped them together pretty quick just to test some theories. If you get a blend example put together I'd like to see it.

Edit: I just reread your post and may have misunderstood what you were saying. For a linear tapered member a blend is definitely the way to go.

[cameron.52045]

Wow Paul - pretty cool & looking hopeful :-)..... thanks for showing me that.

Is it possible to contol which grips appear on the extrusion - so for example you could alter the length but not the width?

.....also (sorry) I am very new to revit so I have no idea what size info I could schedule out from the curves? - would I get the size of a box that envelopes the whole object....?

Peter, I tried the blend which worked well too - can this be combined with a curved path?

I am an ADT user which can be very fast modeling but much slower to document out the 2D's etc - Revit seems to very extremley fast on the documentation side..... would you say that the modeling could be as quick if am doing a whole load of shaped stuff?


.... ah so many questions...... cheers, Cameron

[Paul Andersen]

Cameron, do you have an example of how you schedule such members now?

Coming from a MicroStation / TriForma background and only having played around with ADT I can't speak directly to your modeling comparison question. I will say that once you get used to the Revit way of doing things you can model pretty much anything and generally at near or exceeding the speed of other packages with the bonus of a better, more coordinated document set as a result. You can also create parametric families that suit several purposes, shapes and sizes etc which will also help to make you more productive. RS could still benefit from a few more advanced modeling tools but until then you can still model in several other software packages if you are more comfortable with them or feel that they are faster and then bring those models into RS.

[cameron.52045]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your reply. In ADT I a use Mass Elements (a generic modelling solid) to build the models. I am limited to scheduling out the 'bounding box' which envelopes these solids which can be a bit hit & miss...... I am starting to see that in Revit I can define a dimension that can be used to schedule out info which is very flexible - what a great approach :-).

Thanks for your pointers, I am starting to get to grips with Revit now..... I have a feeling I am going to be a convert :-)

Cheers, Cameron