Issues with analytical model - Revit 2023

[Rafael_Oliveira22]

Hey

I'm doing a project for my masters deegres and in the present step, I need to create a analytical model on Revit 2023 for send to Robot after.

But I tried generate the analytical model with the function "Analytical Automation" but i didn't have sucess, because i had some problems with the analytical model created. 

Problem 1:

Some floors haven't be generated when i use the function "Analytical Automation", while the drop panels were generated.

Problem 2:

So many elements is messy, with the alignment wrong. I tried change the tolerence of the distance between analytical elements but it's not work. In this elements, Apparently they are aligned when we see in 3D physical model and structural plan but on analytical model are alignment wrong

Thanks for your suport!

@Artur.Kosakowski 

@Krzysztof_Wasik 

@okapawal 

@Rafal.Gaweda 

[RPTHOMAS108]

Not sure about the floors issue (more description reqd.) However I found it struggles with shaped floors because it wants to use one panel for an element but a shaped floor has many planar faces.

Regarding the walls you can change the join type to mitre and it'll connect them:

You can see from the above that the shortcomings are based upon how the features are extracted to form the panels. If users are prepared to change the join type for this purpose I'm unsure, I expect there are reasons beyond the analytical model why you may not want to do this.

I think there will be a manual editing aspect to this task for a while yet.

[Rafael_Oliveira22]

@RPTHOMAS108

Thanks for your help.

About the problem 2, I changed the type of join between the walls to "join miter" and it works. Now I can aligned the analytical model for the walls manually.

Returning to the problem 1. I don't know how to model the flat slab with drop panels for create the correct analytical model. At the moment, I am modelling first the flat slab with thickness 0,26m and after, modelling the drop panel with 0,35m and finally, I use the command "join" in the "Modify" menu for join the elements and don't generate duplication of materials in "Schedules/Quantities". Do you have any suggestion of how to model flat slab with drop panels for this situation?

Actually, I have problems with not creation of analytical model for the floors -1 and 0, I think it is happens because i have some unevenness of levels for the floors (like the next images). Maybe, I need simplify it for analitycal model, I don't know...

[RPTHOMAS108 · Accepted solution]

I think these are design and analysis decisions and an indication of why the process is never as simple as press a button and get an analytical model.

For the below I'll add the caveat that you may get better advice on the dedicated Robot forum as to how to proceed.

The step could be dealt with in two ways as I see it:

A) Create a wall element that becomes a vertical panel

B) Create an edge beam at each slab level and tie them together analytically with vertical members. You then design the top beam as the edge beam.

Option A Option B

Option A is likely the easiest to achieve but then you have to consider how the panel is designed as a beam. If the design was being done elsewhere outside of Robot then I would go for that option

Option B allows you to easily design the stick member as a beam in Robot I believe, there may be alternatives.

One thing that stands out for both options is that there isn't necessarily an ideal physical to analytical relationship. 

i.e.

The most natural thing to do in Revit at a step is add structural framing. However the structural framing member will have the analytical stick aligned at beam mid depth but the slab panel will be aligned with the top of the slabs. So there is always adjustment required after the automation step currently. Even if you adjust the automation parameters to align the stick to the nearest level you still only have one stick instead of a stick at each level which would make modelling easier. You would never model two physical beams in Revit for that scenario.

Regarding drop panels I think this is an example of something you would never model in Revit the way it is done in Robot. Ultimately in Robot you are dealing with 2D plate elements which are assigned a thickness. So the way drop panels are generally modelled in Robot is to create openings in the slab plate and fill those openings with a plate element with greater thickness. The equivalent to that in Revit would be cutting openings in the slab and having slab infills with a greater thickness. That isn't really that desirable as in Revit drop panels are likely instead to be created by use of a floor hosted family. There is a similar issue regarding suspended ground floor slab with integrated caps. So these things require a Dynamo/API solution where you subtract the drop panel profiles from the slab.

[Rafael_Oliveira22]

@RPTHOMAS108 

I will investigate about the modeling in Robot and ask on Forum. Thanks for you hint! 

I'm sorry for my late reply, but i was doing some tests in my analytical model and I understood how much the process of creation the physical model can interfere the analytical model. I found some things for my problems that might help someone in the future. 

• In case of floor in sequence with different thickness, the best way to model is one by one. 

In the first time when I modeled my structure, I did a floor with multiples elements but for the analytical model, it is not valid because the Revit doesn't allow More than one loop for analytical model. 

• Take care with small imperfections in the Sketch of floor 

After many time trying to do the automatic analytical model for some floor I found a milimeter imperfection causing not automatic generation for my floor. 

When we see the below image of floor, we can't see nothing ununsual, but when I did a zoom in specific zone, I found a imperfection geometric that causing the problem. 

  

 Geometric Imperfection 

Of course we always can use the manual way to create a analytical model using the panels and members but, it's can be frustrating if we can't to do the analytical model with "Analytical Automation".