Curved beam for barrel roof

[Anonymous]

Can anyone walk me through how to model a curved beam to the underside of a curved barrel roof? I've copied and pasted the Architect's roof diaphragm into my structural model, but I'm not sure how to model a curved beam that can exactly match the underside of the barrel shape. Thank for your help

[Max.Kotsar]

Hi, gguevarra!

It would be excelent if you attach some screenshots or pictures to your questions.

[DParkRMAK]

To make an arched beam you need to have vertical workplane to create the beam. You can now create a beam using the draw tools and either draw a curve or pick existing geometry to make your beam. Use the cross section rotation value to rotate the member as needed.

I needed to rotate the profile 90° and flip it.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the input. Creating a curved beam as you noted makes sense. To me, the difficult part is when you have an existing curved roof that is modeled that you are trying to use as your work plane / reference plane. I've uploaded a picture showing the curved roof. At this point I've just copied and pasted the Architect's roof into my Structural model. But to create the curved beam that matches the roof's curve has been a little trickier. My first attempt was copying and pasting the Architect's mass into my model, but obviously this is not a "beam." My second attempt was using the Truss tool. I placed a curved top chord that matches the curved roof and then deleted the webs and bottom chord. This is probably good enough for what I'm doing, but I feel like there might be a better way. Thanks again.