Revit to Tekla Structural Designer

Since the release of Revit 2023, the analytical model will need to be created independently from the physical model. This enables engineers to author a usable analytical model that represents the physical model but has connected geometry that facilitates structural design and analysis.

Autodesk have provided some Dynamo scripts that are designed to run in the Dynamo Player that attempt to automate the creation of the analytical model. However, this method is not perfect. Of course, you can create your own script to better represent the analytical model or, if you are a Tekla Structural Designer user, you can use the Integrator.

The Tekla Integration ribbon tab contains a tool to manage the import/export functions to and from Revit. The integrator also has a toolset to automate the generation of the analytical model and also check the associativity back to the physical elements.

There is also the option to update an existing model or just send a subset of the model with a user selection.

I have used a model with just over 2000 members to give this a good test. The Analytical Model Creation tool will display the progress of the model generation and then report on each category. Errors and warnings are also displayed which is handy for model checks.

The analytical model, with this test, was created in under 20 seconds. The results were quite good, but the analytical models will need checking and further refinement. Of course, you can use the Revit filters to check unconnected nodes which saves quite a lot of time.

In a future tutorial I will be looking at the creation of the analytical model using Dynamo where we can build the model in stages and control the geometry with a higher degree of accuracy.

Hope that helps,

lawrenceH