All of these styles can of course be configured to your company standards.īefore the drawings can be produced, ASD needs to give each part a unique identifier so the components and assemblies can be referenced on drawings sheets and parts lists. 44 for a UK drawing! ASD will also add dimensions, tags and notes to the drawing views. This process can be highly automated utilising pre configured drawing layouts, scales and preconfigured templates, interestingly, these are numbered by country dialling codes e.g. Once you have all your connections and machining created you are ready to produce some 2D fabrication drawings. Once you have entered all the required parameters and sizes you can save your connection configuration as a template or match properties from other connections. These are 65 macros to choose from and if you can’t find one your looking for you can generate your own custom connections and save them to a library.Īll the connections macros have a similar theme and are fairly intuitive to use. The Ribbon has a panel especially for connections organised logically into flyouts. To add connections to you steel model you use the ASD Model Ribbon in the Steel module. You can then generate detailed 2D assembly and fabrication drawings and then link these back to your Revit Structure project.
If you have not yet investigated these tools then feel free to link to our videos:Ī better solution is to export your Revit Structure model to AutoCAD Structural Detailing 2010 and make use of the vast number of macros to generate automatic connections and machining to your steel models. These connections are, however, fairly limited allowing beam to column flange connection and column base plate connections. With the release of Revit Structure 2010 we now have the ability to model some very simple connections thanks to the subscription tools. This is a great way of providing structural connections to prospective fabricators without having to draft them manually. These can then be directly linked in to Revit Structure via a drafting view. You can then create automatic drawings from the parts and ASD then creates separate sheets with all the required fabrication drawings.
This is done by selecting all the parts and selecting Auto Positioning. Each connection is broken down into component parts and will require positioning ( unique part numbers). It is then a simple case of creating the various steel connections via the numerous macros that exist within ASD. This will then pass the steelwork to ASD, you can either directly launch ASD or create a DWG file to load later if ASD is not installed on your machine.
If anyone is interested in a full tutorial on the workflow in Revit Structure and ASD then let me know and I will produce a YouTube tutorial on this subject?
You first create the steel frame in Revit Structure and then pass this to ASD (AutoCAD Structural Detailing) via the extensions link. This is a great way of providing typical connection details both in 2D and 3D within Revit Structure. With the new extension tools you can now pass your steel frame directly from Revit Structure to Autodesk structural detailing providing you have the extensions installed. I hope that this has given you a basic introduction to the features and techniques needed to transfer models from Revit Structure to ASD. Note that this will also import an engineer’s model from ROBOT which can be quite handy.
Also it is worth noting that ASD contains quite a few links to ROBOT Structural analysis.
However, once this is done, the production of fabrication drawings and CNC code becomes very quick and easy. This can be a very daunting task, see a typical dialog box below! mmm I wanted to keep the tutorial fairly ‘snappy’ ,being restricted to just 15 minutes in YouTube, so have limited this to the basics but as with any complex design tool, templates rule! You will need to invest some time to get a good set of templates together for ASD and get the various dimension and annotation settings configured. This can be really useful for providing typical connection details within your Revit Structure projects and is certainly quicker than creating the various 2D details within Revit, especially when more than one view is required. In this tutorial we will focus in on the steel fabrication. As promised I am going to take you through the process of connecting a steel model created within Revit Structure 2012 to AutoCAD Structural Detailing 2012 (ASD) and generate some fabrication details that we can link back into Revit Structure utilising a drafting view.ĪSD is a very comprehensive application that can generate fabrication drawings for steel detailers and also generate drawings and schedules for reinforced concrete.