Coordinate Scheduling with the Excitech Toolkit

The original Excitech Revit toolkit was created in 2009 to produce coordinate schedules of elements such as isolated foundations, structural columns and any family with a single insertion point. The toolkit provided a solution to those customers who needed to produce piling schedules. An extension to the toolkit was added in 2012 to allow the automatic renumbering of elements, again aimed at piling.

The new Excitech Toolkit was introduced in 2018 and contains a greater number of tools and utilities to improve productivity in a number of different areas. The new toolkit also provides the option of scheduling coordinates from elements.

Please see the video for a tutorial on how our toolkit is used to schedule coordinates.

 

Here you can see the tutorial for the new Revit Excitech Toolkit.

Below is the procedure to create a piling schedule and renumber the piles using our new toolkit.

1. First you select the piles that are required to have coordinates. If you have used a foundation family that has piles nested into the pile cap then you will need to select the sub elements.

On the Excitech Toolkit ribbon in the Selection panel click the Filter command as shown below.

In the Filter dialog box select Structural Foundations and then the pile sub elements that you have used in your project.

Click OK to make the selection.

2. On the Excitech Toolkit ribbon in the Analysis panel, click the Analyse drop down menu and select Insertion as shown below.

You will then see the Insertion Point to Parameter dialog box. Here you can select the internal origin of Revit, the Project Base Point or the Survey Point. For piling that has been set out using shared coordinates, click Survey Point.

Click OK

3. Each pile will now have the following coordinates added. X coordinate, Y coordinate and Z coordinate. These coordinates are at the toe of the pile. X Top Coordinate, Y Top Coordinate and Z Top Coordinate are positioned at the top of the pile (this would also be the cut off level)

 

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Tutorial – Piling with Revit 2019, Dynamo and AutoCAD Civil 3D 2019

In this tutorial we will look at a simple method to generate piling from a finished ground level to a rock stratum from borehole data. Most of you will now have access to the Autodesk AEC collection but, I often find that people tend to use just one or two tools from this collection which doesn’t return value or efficiency. In this workflow we will utilise Revit 2019, Civil 3D 2019 and Dynamo.

This workflow can also be achieved using Dynamo and Revit to find the intersections between the piling and the surfaces, but this can take quite a while to execute on large datasets, is computationally expensive and will invariably crash the machine.

So, presented below is another option if you want to move into the use of Civil 3D. We will start in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2019. In Civil 3D you can either create the surfaces from points or from an existing set of contours a little like the workflow in Revit. We then place the pile locations as AutoCAD points and convert these points into Civil 3D points. The Civil 3D points can then obtain levels from surfaces. The group of points are then exported as a text file.

The next stage is to use Dynamo to organise and prepare these points for use in Revit. The Dynamo script will first open the text file and create an ordered list from the data.

Once this list is created, we then get the Project Base Point from Revit. The PBP is set to the local setting out point. This is then used to create the local coordinates that Revit will need to set out the piles.

Because the top and bottom points are in the same list, we can use dynamo to sort the points on the X coordinates (the X and Y value will be the same for the top and bottom point). This section of the script separates the Eastings, Northings and Levels and transforms the coordinates to local grid suitable for Revit.

The last part then creates the Revit elements and sets the depth parameter to send the piles to the rock level.

Here is the final layout in Revit.

Obviously, we can directly use the coordinates to create a piling schedule and use the point numbers to number each pile.

Hope that has been useful,

Lawrence H

 

Modelling Piling from Microsoft Excel using Revit & Dynamo

Happy New Year to everyone and straight back into the deep end with more Dynamo! Way back in 2013 I reviewed the Excel Model generation tool that allowed the creation of Revit elements based on a spreadsheet. This allowed the modelling of various objects but was limited to generation of only geometry and did not allow the user to add data to the objects.

Link to YouTube Video: YouTube Tutorial

I used this tool to create a Revit piling layout derived from AutoCAD geometry. See Post Below.

https://revitstructureblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/modelling-revit-piling-from-microsoft-excel/

I have since used Dynamo to achieve a better method for the setting out of piling as well as setting the Pile number and even loading.

In this post I will step you through the Dynamo node so that you can create a similar routine. Let’s start with the raw Excel data. In my example I have the Pile Number, the Easting and Northing Coordinates, the Level, Depth (Length of Pile) and the Pile Diameter.

The following image below shows how to select the Excel file and then pass the filename and sheet name into the Excel.ReadFromFile node. Note that I have used a Code Block for the Excel Sheet Name but you can of course use the string node instead.

The next stage is to remove the unwanted headers from the Excel data. The List.DropItems node is removing the first list. Note that list is a ‘nested’ list so will remove the [0] index as shown below.

Next the transpose node is used to sort the data into the correct columns. The current data is stored as rows. The List.Transpose node converts rows to columns as shown below.

The next task is to get all the required data into separate lists so that we can later ‘feed’ this into the nodes to create the piles and also add data to each Revit Element. Dynamo has a node called List.GetItemAtIndex which gets the relevant data. In the below example I am getting the data from index 1 which is the Eastings Coordinates. Index 0 is the first column which is the Pile Number.

This then leads me onto the next problem. By default the piles will be modelled from the origin (0,0,0) and Revit has a geometry limit of 20 miles which will clearly be broken by the large numbers (This project is around 200 miles from the OS base). In the below image you can see the ‘effect’ of geometry modelled a long way from the origin. This is referred to as graphical degradation and will affect the visual and also the accuracy of snaps etc.

In the Project I have set the Project Base Point of a known Pile coordinate

I have then subtracted these values from the Eastings and Northings to give me coordinates relative to my project base point. In the below example I have the known Easting and Northing setting out point set. I then pass this value into a code block (marked with red boxes). The Code block is taking two variables and then subtracting the set out from the real coordinate. The nodes with the blue frames are the original coordinates.

The next step is to then model each pile based on a pre-defined Foundation Family. In this example I have created a round pile with an instance parameter to control the Diameter and another to control the depth. I have named this family ‘Concrete Pile’. The FamilyTypes node will list all loaded Families in your current Revit project. We then use the FamilyInstance.By.Coordinates node to generate each family from the two code blocks that generate the X and Y position and the third which is the ‘raw’ Z levels.

It is now time to make use of the ‘metadata’ such as the Pile Number and the Diameter by utilising the Element.SetParameterByName node. This needs the elements from our FamilyInstance.By.Coordinates node and also a string for the Parameter Name. Again I have used a Code Block for this example. In the image below I am using the instance parameter ‘Mark’ to read the Pile number and then add this into each Pile. This is then repeated for the Pile diameter and if required, the loading.

So anther interesting use for Dynamo in a structural project. I will produce a video tutorial to accompany these notes in the next day or so.

Enjoy,

LawrenceH

Extended Revit Pile and Pile Cap Families

 

http://www.excitech.co.uk/products/Revit-Toolkit.asp

Here is a sneak preview of what will very soon be available as part of our Excitech Revit Toolkit, these familes have been designed to work with our toolkit to facilitate the scheduling of levels and piles.

Optimised for use with our Excitech Revit Toolkit, this extensive library of Pile and Pile Cap families will operate seamlessly within your structural projects and offers many new parameters to facilitate the creation of pile schedules and associated documentation. The range starts from singular piles up to groups of 14, supporting both round and square piles with differing configurations and presented using standard UK pile spacing and edge clearances in conformance to BS8110 and Eurocode 7.

We are also pleased to offer full integration with the Federation of Piling Specialists (FPS) and our schedules can be imported into the FPS Microsoft Excel spread sheet.

These are now live and available in 2013,2014 and 2015 formats.

http://www.excitech.co.uk/products/Revit-Toolkit.asp

 

LawrenceH