Documenting Top of Steel

[kirk.148713]

Does anyone know how to document top of steel in plan?

[Jshaver]

You can use the spot dimension tool. It may require you to set your detail level to medium or fine to place it but it will remain there when you switch back to coarse view. I think its a bit of a limitation but nothing to painful.

[Jshaver]

I just tested this and it seems to be "ok". There is a small gap between the leader arrowhead and the symbolic line of the member due to it reading the elevation on the members physical edge but its not too bad.

[dbaldacchino]

Hi Kirk, interesting thread! I was going to spend some time on this issue myself as we have not found a good way yet.

In our first projects, we tried using the spot elevation tool. First you have to set your view to medium or fine, or it won't work. But this works fine for beams going East-West (horizontal orientation). We show these elevation tags parallel to the beams (it's a lot more readable this way), but you don't have any other options in the spot elevation tool (nor will the text rotate with the rotate tool). We have beams in all directions, so we ended up not using this approach, which is disappointing. The other issue is that we call out Bottom of Deck, so beams that are offset 2 1/2" down due to joist seats, don't report correctly. if you show Top of Steel, then you're ok.

I think we ended up drafting in the height as text (or created a dumb tag), a solution which I wasn't thrilled about as this is not really a BIM approach and is just the old way of doing it in CAD or by hand (ie: prone to a lot of user error and time wasted coordinating). I experimented a bit with beam tags lately. I tried creating a tag to read the start offset and another to read the end offset. These tags can be made to rotate with the element automatically, which is good. Unfortunately, you cannot set what relative level to use when reporting the end and start offsets (if I could tell the tag to read relative to Level 1, then I'd have a solution). Unfortunately this isn't the case and to make it work, you have to place all your beams relative to level 1 and give them offsets, which is completely unfeasible. We add several levels to manage the different roof heights so this solution is out of the question. Such a tag would also work when a beam is set lower due to a joist seat (if you want to show Bottom of Deck), since you can set the beam's z-Direction Justification to "Other" and offset it by -0'-2 1/2" for example.

So I still don't really have a definite answer. I'm in the same boat you are, waiting for something else or some other solution that others might have found. I hope someone else can chip in this discussion!

[Paul Andersen]

Great thread and Welcome to AUGI Kirk! This is still on my list of issues to resolve.

You can eliminate the gap by hovering over the middle of the member using a medium or fine detail level and hidden line display. The spot elevation tool can then use the top surface of the flange to report the elevation instead of just the edge.

If the spot elevation tool could follow the orientation of the member (or at least be able to rotate it manually) it would be a perfect solution in my book. I'm a big fan of the prefix and suffix parameters which I would still like to see incorporated into tags.

We've also experimented with the tag leveraging the End Level and/or z-Direction offset parameters and have run into issues similar to David.

[kirk.148713]

Thanks for your input. This has been a little frustrating. I am in the same boat as you David. We also call out bottom of deck & will run into the same problems. I have also run into a problem with joist framing not accounting for the joist seat. I have to manually drop framing (keeping the analytical line at the level I am framing). The joist tend to follow the drop, so then I have to change the offest from 2 1/2" to 0 on the joists. Is there a better way to model this?

[dbaldacchino]

We have actually been just dropping the support beams by 2 1/2" (the Z justification offset, not the start & end offsets). It's simpler and faster than raising all joists in a beam system! So we model everything on the same level and just offset the geometry of the beams down. This lends itself to the use of a beam tag to report start and end offset as it will be reporting bottom of deck.

One solution would be that toward the end of the project, you would select all beams and then switch them to level 1. Your start and end offsets will change and report relative to this level so your tags read correctly. Unfortunately the engineers don't like the idea of changing the level this way and I understand the reason as levels are used to manage changes in heights. Hence my suggestion to do this toward the end of a project. If we can get a tag that reads relative to a level, then we have a solution.

To make sure the correct tag is placed, I would nest some annotation in the beam family so we can tell which side is the start and which side is the end. Then I'd make the "end offset" tag be one color and the "start offset" be another. Now we can tell if the wrong tag is placed at the wrong end of the beam.