Start improving the efficiency

[KIMRAMFI]

Autodesk’s slogan is make everything and that is pretty true but can you make that everything efficiently? At least not with Revit. Yes, we all know that you can model pretty much everything what are needed in normal building, but the workflow mostly is not efficient and easy. And “use dynamo for automating it” is not the solution.

 You have to start improving existing tools efficiency by adding new options and much more freedom letting us to decide what we want. And next someone will suggest the Idea page, but should you start thinking with your own brains? Could someone from Autodesk work with one structural project and he or she might notice how hard some tasks can be.  

How dare you to market the program for structural design when even the strip footing is causing you a headache?

Today my problem was to create a family for strip footing. Started with line based template, convert it to Structural Foundation category and create reference planes and make them parametric. Then create the graphics and voila! Then the problems start occurring.

You find out that there is parameter called “length” twice and you cannot delete another. You can’t add formula for another to show correct value. Ok maybe but just only maybe we might live with double length parameter, but we can’t when we cannot even calculate the gross volume of the strip footing due to double length parameters. Also the footing corners with angle looks horrible and you cannot clean them. So in conclusion if you need to model the strip footing do it with the hardest way using slab foundation. Not efficient at all but the only way to do it.

In the mean time please go and vote for this:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/strip-footing-without-needing-a-wall/idi-p/6727714

Here’s a new slogan to you Autodesk, feel free to use:

Make everything with the hardest way.

[RPTHOMAS108]

Probably a lot of people use structural framing for this (strip footings, capping beams etc.), with named subcategory.

How you classify it as output to IFC etc. is a different story these days than just needing it to be of the right Revit category. I would experiment with what works best knowing that early wrong choices = harder life later on.

Wall foundations I've always found to be close to useless but that is just me, architects love them perhaps. Mainly I say that because I often want to separate out the substructure model from superstructure (without shared references).

[KIMRAMFI]

Hi! 
Yeah the SF is widely used for sure but is that the intention because software doesn’t allow you to do it correctly?

I can model the strip footing with railing, wall or even with column but that was not the point. There is quite many problems also when using SF especially with joining automatically to the other structures. 

[RPTHOMAS108]

Hello

If they deliver to you a wall foundation without the need for a wall it will be basically structural framing but with category changed to 'Structural Foundations'.

Joining issues such as? Will a new line based wall foundation of concrete material be designed to behave differently to a structural framing item of concrete material (which ways)?

This is the problem I have: a concrete beam of structural framing can't be joined to a monolithic stair it supports also of concrete, why? Only because they are of different categories (not like the real world). I want more consistency between all categories in that respect not less. Easier not to join things than to automatically join  things in my experience but we all have different experiences.

[KIMRAMFI]

HI

In future we are forced to use more and more services like BIM360 Docs and there is huge disadvantage if the category is incorrect. That was just one example. 

And what comes to the joining issues the most visible problem is when you have used SF as strip footing and you model a new wall to level above it will automatically move the foundation away from bottom of the wall. And disallowing joins is not the solution neither. 

[KIMRAMFI]

And forgot to mention how annoying it is to try to model a SF between two isolated foundations because SF does not recognize the foundation category's reference planes. 

Also you cannot model the beam to the correct elevation immediately. You have to model it and edit. 

Revit amazes me every day showing how bad it is for everything. 

[RPTHOMAS108]

I've never come across that join issue to be honest. There is the following tool for changing end alignment of structural framing into a wall or other framing member but you should not be able to use this for concrete structural framing.

Help: Change the Alignment Reference of Beam End Geometry in a Join (autodesk.com)

For concrete members there is no cut-back from what I see, it just goes automatically to far face of wall if node is at centre of wall. Anyway what supports wall in other direction?

[KIMRAMFI]

As I said it was just an example of the behavior we want to avoid but you might meet the issue while creating foundation for retaining wall. We don’t want to model something and then edit it afterwards, it slows down too much. Our workflow is to model it correct first time and that’s it. We want avoid everything what Revit does automatically because most of the time it is wrong and doesn’t help at all. 
It’s great if Revit is suitable tool for you but I hope you understand that there can be different needs. Autodesk should provide tools not force us to work some other way.