Revit 2015 – Structural Framing Enhancements

This will be a very interesting year with regards to steel detailing, fabrication and Autodesk software. A few months back Autodesk purchased Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete to extend their offering in the steel detailing & fabrication industry. The only other Autodesk product was AutoCAD Structural Detailing which I would imagine will start to disappear from the various Autodesk suites that included this as there have been very few developments with this software for the past couple of years

This year Revit 2015 has seem some great interface improvements with regards to the justification points on steel and precast members and member offsets. We will begin by looking at the justification point tool.

This is essentially an ease of use improvement to an existing set of tools to offset steel, timber or precast member both laterally or vertically from the original position to predefined points. This will only reposition the physical position of the member and leave the analytical model unchanged.  The tool can be used equally well in plan, elevation and sections as well as 3D views.

The offset command will reposition the framing member graphically in the Y and Z axis. This is a much easier way of offsetting the structural framing members.

 

The change Reference tool is perhaps my favourite new framing tool in Revit 2015, this tool allows the user to select a new reference for the end of a joined beam and then cycle between these references by using the Change Reference command. See the image below.

Another interesting feature is an existing tool from Revit 2013, the humble shape handle. For those of you that didn’t use Revit 2013 or earlier releases the shape handles allowed a steel, precast or timber framing member to have its physical length changed graphically. Revit 2014 omitted this tool and instead relied on the user inputting values into the Properties Palette which was slightly frustrating!

Structural Framing members can now also carry more information about the members physical dimension as well as analysis properties. Each Framing family now has a new category called Section Shape Property.

Once again I will create a detailed tutorial video on these features when I have access to the final shipping release of Revit 2015.

Enjoy,

lawrenceh

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Revit Structure 2015 – New Reinforcement Tools

Link to YouTube Tutorial: http://youtu.be/XCrTi2KEJ7g

As with all my blog posts about new Autodesk releases I will break down each new feature in separate posts and show the full scope of the new tools and features with a UK focus. Those of you that regularly read my posts will know that I keep a very close eye on the reinforcement tools and any new features or extensions that come to market. This year Autodesk have again focussed on the reinforcement and analytical tools for the specific structural enhancements for 2015. The primary goal with reinforcement is to give the RC detailer a better set of tools for the production of 2D RC drawings and accurate schedules.

In previous releases the RC drawings would show every bar but the user now how the choice of selecting the first and last bar in the set, a middle bar or user selected bars. This feature allows the correct presentation of bars in plan and elevation using a similar system to AutoCAD Structural Detailing.

The Reinforcement descriptions have had a complete overhaul and can now detail bar with a range indicator and the correct terminators and leaders. This has been achieved by combining a dimension style with a rebar tag.

The other issue was with bar marks, Revit 2014 would allow multiple bars with the same dimensions to have the same bar mark! In Revit 2015 the bar mark is automatically generated and can be sequenced with a variety of differing options. Partitions are for setting bar marks for each element, you can also see the feature for removing gaps in bar marks and once this is enabled the process is automatic.

Another interesting concept is that parts can now host rebar, this has some potential but I do really think that families should be authored with parametric rebar, this would make more sense and give a huge amount of flexibility.

All the information and data can now be compiled into a full RC schedule that’s compliant with BS8666-2005.

When the ‘shipping’ version of Revit 2015 is released I will produce a full video showing the capabilities.

Link to YouTube Tutorial: http://youtu.be/XCrTi2KEJ7g

Hope this helps,

lawrenceH