Revit Robot Integration with User Defined Framing Families and Databases

AnthonyMcTigue — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 22:30:27 GMT

Morning All,

I have a situation whereby I could do with a little more information about how the Revit/Robot integration tool works, specifically with regards how it maps sections defined in the Revit families to the corresponding section in a Robot database.

The situation is that I have several user defined section databases in Robot containing a lot of older, obsolete steel sections that are not included in the built-in families/databases that one would frequently encounter in older structures of which we spend quite a lot of time working with. The workflow I have been using is:

Copy the built in Australian sections database and clear out the content to make a completely blank database.
Manually define the basic section geometry in the blank database (i.e. width, depth, height, flange thickness, web thickness) as required by the Autodesk shape codes.
Load the database into a blank Robot section definition project.
Load each section one at a time into the project, calculate section properties (i.e. area second moments of area, section moduli and so forth) and save those to a second blank database.
Generate a link to the database containing all section proberties using Excel xml link tool.
Retrieve all calculate section properties (i.e. area second moments of area, section moduli and so forth) and pate them back into the first blank database used to define only section properties.
Generate a shadow copy of the entire database contents in an Excel spreadsheet formatted to match exactly the Robot xml database.
Use a VBA macro to generate the family types text file to generate a Revit family that contains all the exact same data.

The issue I have is that when I try to export from Revit to Robot, I keep getting the "Mapping of elements" dialogue for all members that are user defined. My custom database do appear in the list of available databases that I can choose from so it is posible to manually map all the used sections to the correct versions in Roboto however, this is an incredibly tedious process and the Revit Robot link doesn't appear to remember what that mapping was so I have to re do at least some members almost every time I update an existing model or create a new one.

This dialogue doesn't come up when you use the built in section database and families and it works pretty much 100% of the time. There must be some trick to naming conventions or something of that sort that goes on in the background that once you get your family types names and section database names matchig and in the correct format, then it will work. Can anyone shed any light on this?

topic Revit Robot Integration with User Defined Framing Families and Databases in Robot Structural Analysis Forum

Revit Robot Integration with User Defined Framing Families and Databases