Radial Reinforcement in Revit with Dynamo

From the Revit Beyond BIM blog:

February 15, 2016

The modelling and detailing of reinforcement in a regular, circular floor in Revit can be done very straightforward using Path Reinforcement or by means of polar arrays.Once these circular floors have a varying thickness, and thus have a complex double curved top surface, the reinforcement modelling is best supported by using Dynamo.

In this post I will explain you how to introduce computational design for reinforcement modelling and this can be done in an easy way. At the end of the post you will be able to download the datasets and watch the instructional video.

Below you can see the circular shaped floor with an opening in the middle. The top surface of the floor has been edited with the “Modify Sub Elements” tool in Revit to get a varying thickness and to generate the double curvature of the face.

The goal is to model and detail the bottom (flat) and top (inclined) reinforcement in this floor.

With Dynamo, this whole process can be automated AND the equal rebars will be grouped in a rebar set, or the so called “Rebar Container”. By using a rebar container, the numbering and thus also the annotations can be set to a group of rebars, indicating the total amount of elements in the set of equal rebars.

The applied workflow is practically the same for every “Dynamo rebar” project. You start by creating the appropriate geometry in Revit. Then you take the reference lines, faces or model in Dynamo. These references are then being used for the creation of the rebar centerlines. Therefore it is important that you re-calculate the cover from the formwork shape to the rebar centerlines by adding additional parameters (i.e. c1, c2, …like shown in the image below). Finally you create the rebar objects in the Revit model by using the “Dynamo for Rebar” package.

Datasets

The datasets that are used in the video below can be downloaded via this link.

Instructional video

If you want to learn how this is done, you can find the recorded screencast with voice-over on this link at Autodesk Knowledge Network (AKN).

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There's more information available on the Revit Beyond BIM blog.