Is Risa-3D good for wood building design?

[milkshakelake]

I have some relatively small 2 to 3 story wood buildings I need to design. Is Risa 3D good for this? I need to calculate joists, studs, jambs, headers, and beams. I'm downloading their trial right now, but I'm wondering if anyone has long term experience with this software.

I currently design wood buildings by hand. This takes incredibly long, and after the 50th or so building of doing it this way, I'm tired of it.

 

[lexpatrie]

Spreadsheet, if you ask me. Do the difficult stuff in the spreadsheet and use FORTE for the easy stuff and slowly build it out to do what you want it to exactly the way you want it to do it.

RISA isn't really my program, anyway, it always feels so cobbled together and hard to interrogate. Plus you have to have two separate modules if you're doing lateral design. RISA-Floor and the other RISA.

I also don't recommend EnerCALC as last time I looked at it it doesn't check sill plate crushing.

What I used to use was a Canadian software called WoodWorks Sizer, pretty clean program, decently clear calculation output. I never got to trying the Shear wall module, or we didn't have it at the time, not sure which.

If you are doing FTAO shear walls, RISA is decent at that.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

RISA-3D is really good for designing wood members. But, it doesn't do TJI type joists if that's what you have. That is available in RISAFloor though.

RISA-3D will allow you to do wood shear walls.... However, how much you like this feature may be up for debate. There are a lot of assumptions made during a wood wall analysis / design that you need to make sure you're comfortable with. Personally, I'd say it's pretty good. But, not perfect. I'd have to more thoroughly evaluate the other software out there for wood design. RISA-3D, WoodWorks and Enercalc are the main ones I think of. Which one is best, I'm not sure.


Caveat: I work for another software firm (CSI) that doesn't do much in the way of wood. I also used to work for RISA under the original ownership. I was there for 16 years and I helped develop of lot of the wood features in RISAFloor and RISA-3D. So, I am not exactly an unbiased source.

 

[Flotsam7018]

Generally, no. RISA 3D has its place for me in wood construction in a couple of scenarios: 1) modelling discrete portions of the structure where it is warranted, such as systems with transfer beams. 2) Ambitious lateral systems. You can do a full boar semi-rigid diaphragm analysis with wood framed shear walls, steel frames etc. This is certainly worth it for the right project.

For run of the mill framing calcs I wouldn't bother. I use a combination of Enercalc, excel/SMath worksheets, and hand calcs. Do I love that process? Not really, but I'm unaware of anything that can easily replace it.

 

[milkshakelake]

Thanks everyone for your opinions. I decided not to go with it, because I have some spreadsheets for this stuff and that seems to be the common way.

@lexpatrie I do use Sizer and Connections, but didn't have too much of a good time with Shear Walls. I didn't see that it really saved time compared to spreadsheets. I haven't done FTAO for a while, but it's good to know that Risa can handle it.

@JoshPlumSE I use a bunch of your CSI products, but have plenty of issues. Anyway, no product is perfect, and I think ETABS and SAFE are top notch in terms of the competition, though I haven't tried Risa.

 

[lexpatrie]

I haven't used any CSI product in a really long time, it was probably Etabs and Safe circa 2000 and both of those drove me crazy with the non-windows GUI cut and paste.

I wouldn't ever use EnerCalc for anything, ever. Unless I had a bird, which I don't. I cannot trust that software. If I had the original lotus 123 files, that might change my mind.

As to normal analysis, I've done one with RISA 2d and I got through it. The project was a mess that was on fire by the time "we" got it, so it wasn't a fun experience but that's not on the software. (the original engineer did the project in EnerCalc and didn't read the documentation, so there were problems with the design that started at the footing designs and extended all the way up, wood stud walls, etc.).

The RISA technical support folks are fantastic. Or they were, at the time. 2 years ago? Three?