Revit & Dynamo - Structural Applications for Wood/Concrete Podiums

[sticksandtriangles]

This post is specifically targeted at Celt83, who inspired me to dive deep into the applications that Dynamo and Revit may have for structural engineering. Others feel free to chime in as well if you have explored this territory.

There is really no goal here with this post other than I wanted to cross compare what my script can do verses Celt's script for wood podium load take downs.

Anyways, Celt, I have now created a dynamo script that automatically creates line loads at the base of walls modeled in Revit.

It was much more difficult than I had anticipated due to the fact that trying to code whether a wall stacks or not is much more difficult than I had originally imagined (got there by calculating y = mx + b and then some if statements testing if the start and end points matched). I now know the basics of python code as the out of the box dynamo nodes were not doing the trick.

Data now available to engineers is the following (after engineer inputs snow load, dead load, wall weight, trib. area):

- Line loads per level (dead load, live load snow load etc), dynamo script can tell if walls stack and will add up load down the height of the stacking wall​

- Line loads are created in revit which can be easily exported to our design software (RAM Concept, ETABs etc.). Dead loads, live load, snow load lines are automated based on engineer input to the walls. This saves a lot of time for load takedowns as compared to what we did previously (manual load takedown)​

- Future improvements could be load combinations for axial loads in wood walls per level; checking wood stud wall capacities based on load combo data (I believe you had mentioned you push data from revit to your python script to itemize all of your wall designs); I could also see the automation of up-down point couples due to seismic and wind at the ends of wood shearwalls
​

I believe you mentioned that your script could also handle odd ball loading like point load and xfer loading condition. I am curious as to how you account for this. Do you automate the creation of point loads in your dynamo script based on the odd ball loading?

Also, more just curiosity, does anyone in your office help you with these tasks, or are you a one man wrecking crew? How were you able to sell upper management (or are you upper management and you sold yourself) on the potential benefits these in house developped scripts might have?

Thanks,
S&T

S&T

 

[Celt83]

On our end we model walls from base to top, sounds like you model individual lifts for each floor, which simplifies finding the transfer conditions since I can just reference the wall base level and if it's not the transfer slab then I can mark it.

For the oddball loading I just have extra properties on the wall for miscellaneous loading from the floor inputted as kip/ft numbers, haven't got a handle on variable loading along the wall panel yet so have the engineers break panels as needed to capture variations. In our office the engineers are also the drafters so everyone has varying degrees of skill with Revit.

I assume your line loads are drawn in Revit and you are then exporting to a CAD file and linking into Concept and tracing, if you haven't already look into the STAAD gcff file structure you should be able to write out a file and simply import it into concept to get the line loads automatically without any tracing required. In theory you could also write the column and slab data to the gcff file and completely automate the concept file creation.

I'd like to extend what I did to posts and like you mentioned shear wall chords but actual work trumps my programming endeavors.

In my office there are two of us trying to spearhead the R&D movement but as happens we've been quite busy and opportunities to work as a two man programming team have been few and far between, so I have been leading the charge on developing things to a point they can be used but not much spit and polish per se.

Getting things adopted has been pretty "easy" my boss is a bit of techie himself and sees the potential value in automating some of the processes. "Easy" is in quotes because everyone is technically on board with using the scripts but the times they do get used it's usually them calling me over to run it or me walking by and seeing them doing something manually that we have a script for and me gently reminding them of that fact. As with all things just takes time.






Open Source Structural Applications:

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

 

[sticksandtriangles]

Interesting, I did not think of modeling as one continuous wall, how do you handle say differing live/dead loads per floor level with your setup?

I assume your line loads are drawn in Revit and you are then exporting to a CAD file and linking into Concept and tracing,

No tracing or CAD file creation at all, Revit and concept can directly talk to each other through the ISM file that bentley utilizes as a go between for revit and RAM products. My dynamo scripts automatically creates dead loads and live loads within revit which then can be directly read by concept through their ISM. This was the main reason I wrote my script, to automate the always tedious process of load take downs from the wood designer to the concrete designer. See grainy picture below, this is a dead load line load created in revit by the dynamo script that will be auto generated in concept through the ISM file.

Wood person models walls above, hits run on the script and then the concrete podium engineer exports this data to an ISM file which can be read by concept.
Upon import, concept now has line load populated on dead load plan, live load plan etc.

Overall, it looks like I took a differing approach from you, I always find it interesting to cross compare setups.
Feel free to ask me if you have any questions about my script, you've been very generous in sharing your knowledge and I appreciate that!




S&T

 

[Celt83]

ah cool they must have updated the ISM since the last time I used/looked into that could prove very useful.

so for differing levels the wall family has properties to define dead and live area loads per floor/lift and the wall itself has properties to define the tributary width at each floor/lift. Any delta in load left over we pick up with the misc. loads so say a corridor in a wood level the wall family would have 40 psf live load for the floor and we'd manually do 60 psf * the corridor trib. as a misc. live load to capture what gets lost by the automation. So our process still requires a decent amount of input from the engineer.

Open Source Structural Applications:

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

 

[sticksandtriangles]

Got it, makes sense.

S&T