Making shop drawing or Assembly like plans for steel connections

[mgolkaYBHFE]

Essentially as the title says. I'm currently working in a BIM project and currently the work should be completed as much as possible in Revit. My main issue currently is making views of the steel connections that are in the model. I wanted to make it into an assembly and take views from that, but looks like I cant. Do I really have to take like 20 views of the various connections to properly display them?

[GHASEM_ARIYANI]

Hello, @mgolkaYBHFE 

In Revit, the Assembly tool cannot be used with Steel Connections. This is mainly due to Revit’s inherent limitations in producing detailed structural steel shop drawings, and also aligns with Autodesk’s product strategy.
Proper structural steel shop drawing workflows require member and connection numbering, including:
Single Part numbering
Main Part numbering
Assembly Part numbering
based on identical or similar elements. These capabilities are not natively available in Revit.
Since Autodesk provides Advance Steel as a dedicated solution for structural steel detailing, the recommended workflow is:
Perform structural modeling in Revit
When detailed steel shop drawings are required, transfer the model to Advance Steel using the Advance Steel Extension
Complete assembly creation, numbering, and shop drawings in Advance Steel
This approach follows Autodesk’s intended workflow for steel projects and provides the most reliable and accurate results for steel detailing.

[GHASEM_ARIYANI]

Additionally, all Steel tools in Revit are based on the Advance Steel database. However, this database cannot be edited directly within Revit.
Any modification or customization of the steel database (such as connections, bolts) requires Advance Steel.

Therefore, if database-level control or customization is needed, Advance Steel is mandatory, while Revit remains primarily a modeling and coordination platform for steel structures rather than a full steel detailing solution.

[jay_colcombe]

To add something different to the conversation.  These are on the Revit Structural Roadmap for future implementation

Revit - Structure Roadmap - AEC Tech Drop

[sagnewYUXLR]

To be fair this roadmap has been in place for a while now and I haven't saw anything come from it. 

just a few tweaks and things could be so much better in revit with the steelwork side of things but still not there yet. (being able to assemble plates, anchors, bolts etc) being able to import smlx from advance steel into the family editor etc. 

as it stands, you are probably better modelling/detailing in advance steel and using an ifc export in revit for coordination 

[piotr_pysz]

Hi @mgolkaYBHFE,

I wanted to chime in here because I see a bit more nuance to your question, and I also want to clarify the direction Revit is heading.

1. Design Documentation vs. Fabrication

Reading between the lines, it sounds like you are likely in the design stage rather than strictly detailing for fabrication. You aren't necessarily looking to create a manufacturing instruction (a shop drawing) for a fabricator, but rather an efficient way to document typical connections on your engineering drawings without generating dozens of manual live section cuts and call-outs.

2. Revit Strategy & Upcoming Features

I also want to address the comments above regarding product strategy and development speed.

• Strategy: It is not our strategy to keep detailing exclusively in Advance Steel forever. On the contrary, we are actively pushing more detailing capabilities directly into Revit. Supporting Assemblies and Shop Drawings is considered the absolute foundation for our future investments.
• Progress: To address @sagnewYUXLR  point about the roadmap—we are moving forward. Numbering is coming soon and is actually already available for testing in the current Preview Release.

3. Will Assemblies solve your specific problem?

This is the important nuance: Even though we are working on Assemblies for steel, they might not immediately resolve the specific documentation workflow you are struggling with.

Revit Assemblies are generally designed to follow Fabrication/Detailing logic:

• A "Fabrication Assembly" is defined by what is shipped to the site as one unit (e.g., a Column + welded plates).
• An "Engineering Connection" usually requires seeing the interaction between multiple assemblies (e.g., the Column Assembly and the Beam Assembly bolting into it).

If you use a Fabrication Assembly view, you might only see the column and its welded parts, while the connecting beam is excluded because it belongs to a different assembly. Therefore, while we are building these tools, they are primarily targeting the Detailer/Fabricator definition of an assembly.

4. Future Improvements

That said, we do have an item on our internal backlog specifically focused on "Ease of documenting connections on GA drawings." We recognize the productivity losses involved in manually managing these views today. While it is not the top priority at this exact moment, we are aware of the gap and looking at ways to solve it for the engineering workflow specifically.