Does anyone use Revit for Structural Analysis?

[MidwestSE]

I'm just curious - does anybody out there use Revit for structural analysis and design? I've used RISA, RAM, and a bunch of other programs...does anyone have any experiences using Revit they wouldn't mind sharing?

Thanks!

 

[JAE]

I don't think Revit does structural analysis. Revit interfaces with various structural analysis programs out there (RISA and RAM for instance).

So you can build your model in Revit off the building model, then import into RISA, add loads and analyze/design the members, then import your member sizes back into the Revit model.

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[MidwestSE]

I think the program "Robot Structural Analysis" (Autodesk's structural analysis program) is now internal in Revit? I could be wrong. I've never heard of any colleagues using it.

I've used the RISA and RAM interfaces with Revit - both are pretty slick.

 

[JAE]

I tried to use Robot once (we have a copy) and I couldn't figure it out - it was definitely NOT intuitive but maybe that was an issue of European based software hitting the hard head of a US engineer.

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[Celt83]

It used to to be able to do some simple analysis for beams/columns, simple bar elements, as long as the analytical model was cleaned up properly, there was a cloud analysis option but as far as I know that was discontinued late last year/early this year. I never did anything serious with it though as it's not documented and always came off as something that was just thrown in to add to the marketing materials.

Robot is fairly powerful on the analysis side but is completely undocumented and the US market is certainly an afterthought. Spend 5 minutes on the Robot forums and you can find several posts of overtly incorrect design checks.

Open Source Structural Applications:

https://github.com/buddyd16/Structural-Engineering

 

[JoshPlumSE]

AutoDesk acquired Robot a few years ago. Probably as a response to Bentley buying out RAM and STAAD.

For whatever reason, Robot has never done very well in the North American market. It makes a big push every decade or so. But, it never seems to gain any real market share. Even though it is known as a solid program over in Europe. Maybe with AutoDesk behind its next push it will have more luck. Especially if they do a good job of interacting with Revit.

That being said, the idea of doing your ANALYSIS within Revit is one that I would move away from very quickly. Revit is meant for drafting, drawing production and BIM. It's hard to understand the complexities of load management (skip loading, live load reduction, load combinations, et cetera) within a program like that. I'd be much more excited about a real solid link between a good analysis program and Revit. If Robot is the company that does that best, then it's worth trying out.

Caveat: I used to work for RISA, though I no longer do. I wasn't too involved in the Revit interaction / integration when I was there. But, I know the company put a lot of effort into it. That was, of course, before they were acquired by Nemetschek.

I have this fear that these larger entities (Nemetschek, Bentley, and AutoDesk) are going to start favoring their "in-house" analysis solutions and only paying lip service to working with the others. And, vice versa as well. Maybe these various analysis programs will devote all their development energy into working with the BIM package from their parent company and stop significant development on working with the others. That would be very unfortunate. Thankfully, I don't yet see any whispers of this happening at RISA. But, it would be interesting to hear if others have experienced this sort of thing with Robot, RAM, STAAD... or even RISA (since I'm no longer in the loop with all things RISA).