wall profile question

[..shaner]

hi everyone, im working on a project where we have alot of concrete walls with profiles applied to them. these are openings that are not being cut by a door or window. My coworkers who are working on structural components are now informing me that this may cause a problem with both their analytical model and concrete area calculations. Im wondering how should i be drawing my walls with complex profiles without using the wall profile command?

thanks for any suggestions

shane

[dbaldacchino]

Wall Profile-> You mean Host Sweeps?

If that creates a problem, then I would model those sweeps as separate generic model families, using the line based template. Then just click start & end, set your elevation offsets and you're done. These are independent of walls but still give you the same visual result for elevations/sections. The analytical model won't be affected. The same technique works for making interior drawings with paint stripes, wainscots etc. applied to the face of walls.

EDIT: Oh, are your co-workers using Revit Structure? If so, couldn't they copy/monitor your walls? That way they can assign any wall they need and theirs will follow any movement by your walls. I believe sweeps would be ignored.

[..shaner]

i mean, when i click 'edit profile' to turn a rectangular wall into a funky shaped wall, it dosnt work well with the analytical model or area calculations of that wall( if i want to do a volume calc of concrete in the building)

i cant split the wall its messing up my brick courseing (sweeps, soldier courses, etc.).

creating a seperate sweep is a nightmare with a large building with many walls and corners etc.

[dbaldacchino]

Oh I see, I wasn't fully awake yet :)

Well, if that is the case, then using the Copy/Monitor function would be your best bet. But after all, they have to analyse the walls with their current configuration/openings, correct? Could you try use in place voids to carve out your walls instead of editing the profile? It's a bit more time consuming but it should yield the same results.

[..shaner]

ya i was afraid of that, it seems its the direction im going to have to go with, now that we've gotten our structural crew to use revit.

this has been a challenging project because weve always just only did architectural in revit, but now our firm is moving towards doing both structural and architectural, and eventually mech/elect. too, so im in the process of refining my ways of drawing to suit other diciplines.. it sucks but i guess it has to be done


Oh, another question, with the openings ive had problems making an opening that extends outside of the original shape with roofs will i get the same problem with walls?? say i want to chop off a corner of a rectangular wall, is this possible or do i need to leave a little sliver of wall?

there needs to be a way to make wall sketches more integrated into calculations and struct!!!! maybe in R10!

thanks for the suggestion

[dbaldacchino]

No, in walls the opening can go outside of it's host and it still works. And voids would let you cut multiple walls if you model the panels individually and make a void that spans multiple panels.

We don't do any tilt-up.....it's been over 2 years since our last one and we had external structural on that job. So I don't know what problems you run into with wall analytical etc. The industry is moving towards a much more collaborative environment, so it's inevitable that we need to start caring more about how each discipline's work affects the others'.

[..shaner]

well it wasn't that our structural was out of office, but they used AutoCAD, we'd just export our Revit and make them some backgrounds,

we were always coordinating and taking their needs into considerations in an architectural standpoint, but now we need to start taking their needs into consideration in a drawing and modeling standpoint too, I'm just mentioning this because we had some ways they we can accomplish what we want architecturally in Revit (eg. wall profiles, footings drawn as walls, etc.) and it looked good, but now we need to refine those methods and its taking alot longer to produce drawings

[dbaldacchino]

I hear your pain :)

It does take a while to get good drawings out when you first start, but once you develop a good system, templates and family library, it will make you more productive than ever before (and much more well coordinated). Our drawings are now beginning to look great but it took a lot of energy. And I have to say that the sooner you can get rid of dwg's, the better you will be (text has been a terrible nightmare....mtext is moody, big time). Our next round of attack will be to migrate all our prototypical stuff into drafting views and sheets so we don't touch dwg drawings except from some consultants.

But back to structural...we have in-house structural and it's been working pretty good on our first big job. We haven't altered much of our methodology, but we do depend more on them to make sure the model is up to date or our sections look silly! We have not started to take advantage of sending the model to analysis software yet (we didn't have much luck with ETABS and most engineers in our office don't like it), so we're looking at other packages in the meantime.