WoodWorks Software Shearwalls 2023 3

[TBacon]

Hello. I am resurrecting this thread as the previous posts about the WoodWorks Shearwalls software is a few years old. I do small commercial and residential design (mostly wood framed buildings) and recently discovered the Shearwalls software. Currently I use Revit for building modeling, and generating plans, Enercalc for element design and get my wind and seismic forces by hand. I find the current wind load analysis to be pretty tedious and thought the primary value in the WoodWorks software would be in getting the wind and seismic loads to each LFRE wall line, maybe not so much in the actual analysis of the walls themselves. But I'm curious if there are others out there currently using the software and if so what you like or don't like about it. Thanks very much.

 

[phamENG]

I had it until recently, but let my subscription lapse. It wasn't really worth it.

I've come to the conclusion that wind load analysis does not need to be complicated. It's very imprecise and it's really not worth spending an extra 2 or 3 hours nailing it down exactly to get the overall base shear down by 400lbs. I've developed a table of wind speeds and exposure categories to get an 'average' wind pressure on light frame wood buildings with flexible diaphragms. So my wind analysis takes about 5 minutes now. Then I use a flexible diaphragm assumption in most cases, so splitting the load out to the shear wall lines is easy. From there, it's either a simple case of division to get shear loading for a segmented wall, or a spreadsheet for perforated or FTAO. Iterating to allocate based on stiffness can take some time, but my first pass always uses the 2b/h modification factor to take advantage of not having to match up stiffnesses. It usually works, but if it doesn't I focus in and fine tune it.

The nice thing about Shearwalls is the ability to bracket the solution with both rigid and flexible assumptions, giving you a design that will work for the actual semi-rigid condition that exists in reality. If you want to do this without an extra subscription, Enercalc has a rigid diaphragm distribution calculation. I haven't used it, but I glanced at it and I believe it works for this scenario.

Also, the things where I'd really want Shearwalls...the complex ones with offset diaphragms and diaphragm discontinuities...beyond the scope of the software. Doh!

 

[Celt83]

The woodworks tool ends up pretty good for houses or simple rectangular buildings. I found some of the input procedures to be annoying and have had it crash a number of times, the basic modeling approach for the wall lines really needs a spreadsheet based input rather than the current implementation of click drag and then fill in a field for more precise location. Sloped walls and odd conditions are not handled by the software at all so back to hand methods for those.

 

[milkshakelake]

It saves time for me, but with a thousand caveats.

When there is weird FTAO stuff going on, I have to approximate the stiffness with some pretty imprecise and hand-wavy methods. I reached out to Woodworks about it directly and they didn't have a great answer for me, so I did my own thing (not to hate on them; they're extremely helpful in general). The good thing is that it can do an enveloped calculation for you, like assuming rigid and then flexible diaphragm. I'm definitely not doing that on my own. That being said, I haven't used the latest version (also let my subscription lapse) and maybe they implemented FTAO by now. Like phamENG, I just do assume-flexible-diaphragm calculations on my own these days. I also haven't had to tackle a very complicated wood project in a while, so maybe I'll revisit it when that happens.

There is no software as far as I know that will do irregular diaphragms and a lot of the weird stuff that's going on with wood these days. I haven't gotten one of those projects for a while, and I'm kind of dreading the day I do. I really don't like that book about irregular diaphragms; it's like nearly impossible to understand.

 

[XR250]

I do it basically the way Pham does. 5 minutes tops usually on my HP11C. .

 

[Aesur]

We use the shearwalls program only for larger rectangular buildings and there are quire a few tricks you will learn over time, one of this is manually input your loading, including both wind and seismic (as you would by hand), else you will get some crazy looking loading, that may have some legitimacy to it (think re-entrant corner distances), but is overly complex. For single family residential, unless rectangular, the software is useless as it doesn't do angled walls or even L shapes correctly. It's a huge time saver for the right projects, but currently doesn't work for the majority of projects out there, this can be said about almost all software.

 

[jerseyshore]

I use the Enercalc SW module if I have multi story walls and don't feel like adding up the shears. If it's just one story it's easier to just run it by hand and check the book usually. I agree with everyone above that it's not worth trying to split the atom with these things. Reality is there are a billion houses without engineered shear walls and they are mostly fine so anything we add will help.