Architectural to Structural

[Fairfax]

I am getting more involved with the Engineering aspects of my designs and was wondering if anyone had a good (read simple/fast) techinique for generating structural wall layouts from architectural designs. Typically, I need to take the walls from the architectural model in plan view and replace all windows and door symbols with lines across the openings to spec headers and beams. Ideally, I would like to have these dynamically linked to the architectural drawings.

Thanks,

Graham

[Kevin]

Not sure exactly what you are looking for. VW has a wall framer function that will provide framing members. There are also steel structural shapes that can be extruded into beams and columns.

[CipesDesign]

Hi Graham, I do something like that now, using classes to turn certain things on or off. For example, if all of my door & window PIO's are in a class called "doors & windows" and all of my beam & header lines (I use a special dash style) are in a class called "beams & headers" then I can create the following views: for my floor plan the door & window class is set to visible and the beam and header class set to invisible, then for my framing plan I just switch them. This works beautifully but with one pretty crucial caveat: if there is trim on the door or window it will also be invisible and therefore the opening width (for the framing plan view) will be wider than it should be by the width of the trim. [As a note: IMO this is a flaw in the way the PIO's have been written - that the trim ends up "owning" the piece of wall it covers. This will also show up if you run the wall framer command and there is trim on a PIO - the header lengths will all be too long by the width dimension of the trim. ] Hope that helps :-)

[ 04-03-2005, 01:10 PM: Message edited by: CipesDesign ]

[Delmer]

Wow, that would be a great feature.

Click on "Display in Structural Engineering Mode" and all headers (maybe even with editable callouts attached)come on replacing sashes, door swings etc.

[Fairfax]

Thanks for the responses. The idea of using classes seems like the way to go (at least at present), save the error in header lengths, but structural views are not often dimensioned anyway in my experience. Peter, for the sake of argument, why do you put your beams & headers into your model as class objects? Wouldn't it be easier to just add them to the structural viewport as annotations,or am I missing another application. I think it would be great if window and door objects had a "header" mode, though you'd have to have a programmatic means of switching to that.

[CipesDesign]

Graham, there are two reasons I use a design layer for the beams & headers: 1) I got used to doing that way a long time ago, and; 2) It is actually faster as I do not need to enter the VP annotations, etc. But that said, I think it would perfectly OK to use the annotations for that info. P

[Fairfax]

Peter, thanks for all your helpful insight. Do you have a good technique for header and beam lines? I had to draw three lines for each one, one for the actual beam/header and two as "wall caps." It wouldbe great to have a plugin object for such things, but I haven't looked in to creating such a thing. BTW, I started with MiniCAD and am still trying to train myself to use viewports instead of the reflex to layer links.

Cheers,

Graham

[Travis]

Graham,

You might try creating a wall style that has 0 height, but with cavities defined however you like for your beam detail. Then set wall defaults to caps at both ends and quickly draw "walls" for each header.

You have the option to either have already applied the header wall style, or you can go back and apply it once and then Eyedropper that style onto the rest of the headers. As long as you use Peter's class distinction, you should be fine.

Hope this helps,

[islandmon]

Creating a separate 'S-Beam' layer for each floor allows the use of the Wall Tool combined with Objects to create the beams & headers without conflicting with the walls. These layers can then be share as links with S-Columns & S-Walls and turned on and off in Viewports. This avoids using Class Attributes to define critical path Structural Members. Ideally, Class Attributes should only be used as declarations on the components of Structure. For example, line weights & hatch fills & textures.

eja

[CipesDesign]

Even though it goes against the convention of using only a line to represent a beam (or any other framing member) I use a rectangle with a dashed beam line across its center, then I group the two. They can then be strecthed to span any opening. You could do the same thing with your 3 lines: group them, then duplicate and stretch to fit. Hope that helps.

[Fairfax]

I like the use of classes to turn off the windows and doors in floorplan, allowing it to be used for structural drawings. I found out that doing the beam symbols in Viewport Annotation is not a great idea - you often need them in several viewports, so better in the design layer in another class as Peter suggested IMHO. My engineer pal suggested that he likes to se beam and header extend over the trimmers, so I've been using three lines (2 wall caps and a center line). I group them and stretch to fit.

Thanks!

[CipesDesign]

Hi Again Graham, I agree, if what we ultimately want - and I certainly vote for this - is a model of the project, and the ability to extract certain views from the model, then anything that actually exisits (eg: beams) should be in a design layer, and only thise things that don't actually exist (in the finished product, like notes & dimensions, etc) should be put in VP annotations. Fortunately though, VW's is very flexible in that it is up to the individual user to decide how to use it...