Revit Structure - benefits and real use cases of dynamo

1

Hi,

Can anyone give me some real world uses of Dynamo in revit structure? We are looking into it to improve efficiency/time management but so far I am struggling to find anything that might be of use.

Sheets etc. are all set in our job templates
We don’t really deal with family properties/parameters as its all the preloaded steel sections
We use linked models from architect in ours as our ‘xref’

Would love to go deeper into it but struggling for specific use cases as nothing is jumping out to me that it could solve.

Love to hear some feedback.

Thanks

2

Off the top of my head:

  • Automated framing member layout
  • Integration with Robot and Advance Steel for analysis and detailing
  • Interop with other analytical toolsets
  • Detailed control over the analytical stick elements
  • Creation of connections
  • Populating details
  • Printing
  • Marking revisions
  • Identifying “odd size” members
  • Etc.

You may not want all of these, but with structural in particular it’s odd to find a firm which doesn’t benefit from some of them in daily work.

2 Likes
3

Although there are tons of Structural opportunities to use Dynamo, I wouldn’t force yourself to “find” a use case just so you can use Dynamo to fix it. Look for the things you hate doing in Revit, the processes that take way too long or constantly have to be corrected. If you’re perfectly happy with Revit and your current workflows then there’s no need to spend time with Dynamo. However, I’m guessing that’s not the case, and while not every situation can be automated by Dynamo, most of them will at least give you insight into how you could start using Dynamo or other applications to increase efficiency - and that’s where I think the real benefit lies.

3 Likes
4

Hi,

I agree with the comments above, I also think Dynamo works well as a malleable addin solution, where you can build a useful tool and easily customise it for different use cases.

I would bet that if you look at one of your existing tools, you have a ‘wish it would do that’. For example, Purging doesn’t remove unused View Templates.

Another example, the in-built Revit ‘Transmit model(s)’ tool is great, but it won’t let you ‘only leave in DWG links which have the word Survey in their name’. Or ‘only strip sheets where the titleblock doesn’t have Splash in their name’. etc.

Taking a basic graph and adding in these bits of functionality is pretty easy, and you can just add the extra bits for the people who need it. And that graph will also use the Purge View Templates you built for your internal model tidy ups.

That being said, we use the DiRoots addin ProSheets, and it is much much better than the Dynamo Graph I built :smiley: even though it doesn’t ‘export DWGs using the sheet View if the sheet name contains GA and the view is of type Plan’ (thereby being GeoLocated).

Hope that’s useful,

Mark