Accessing Structural Beam Systems

Recently while working on a project with a good number of structural beam systems and consistently having to manually override dimensions with information about that beam system, I began to wonder if Dynamo could access the parameters of the beam system and the add that information to a multi-segment dimension.

After trying a couple different approaches but kept running into problems trying to access the multi-segment dimension I asked @john_pierson , author of the Rhythm package for some help since I knew he had some nodes dealing with dimensions and some structural items.

After going back and forth in some e-mails, we finally came up with:

So, the user has to select the multi-segment dimension that they wish to add the number of and spacing of the beam system to. There is also a number slider which will require some trial and error on the user’s end. This number slider controls a point that is offset from the midpoint of dimension towards the beam system. This offset point is then what gathers the information from the beam system to write back to the dimension.

I have only tested this in Revit 2016 and Dynamo 1.3.2 and does require the Rhythm package.

Sharing this with the group in the hopes that other users find this useful. Also curious to see if there are other solutions that people might come up with. There is always more than one way to look at a problem and come up with a solution.

beam%20system%20info

S.Beam System Dimension (1.3.2).dyn (28.0 KB)

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