Steel Shop Drawings in Revit -- automation with Dynamo?

Has anyone tried using Revit to make small sets of steel shop drawings? I have recently trialed Advance Steel, and found the conversion process from Revit to be cumbersome and inaccurate, especially with a tightly modeled and detailed small scale structure in Revit (including custom components and families), something required for coordination with other trades as we are design engineers making a high LOD model. It seems like this process would be best suited to taking the bones of a large model and detailing it in Advance Steel, or for a steel fabricator to get a head start making shop drawings.

While Revit is obviously not designed for this, I have actually found Revit making shop drawings not too terrible, using schedules and assemblies, the problem is this process isn’t automated, and piece drawings have to be manually made and detailed one at a time, which takes a lot of time. The new steel tools give a lot of options for fully detailing steel structures directly in Revit.

I haven’t played around too much with Dynamo, would this be something I could use to automate this process of creating, tagging, and dimensioning assemblies and putting the views on sheets?

This could get you started: Shop Drawings

1 Like

Thanks for the video.

It doesn’t show very much in the way of Dynamo, just that you can use it to automate creation of assembly views, something that is a fairly quick process. I am looking to do more - automate dimensions and tagging, and placing the views on sheets.

Both are also doable. Have a look around the forum for other examples.

I also recommend you start with the Dynamo Primer. Don’t skip any of the exercises, even if they feel like something you won’t need. It’s not the outcomes which are important, but the methods used to achieve them.

Thanks, I will definitely watch the entire primer, it is something I need to learn anyway as I use Revit extensively.

Can I ask though for a little more info on what I need to learn to do specifically what I am asking?

After the basics which are covered in the primer, a few custom packages are worth learning, specifically I’d start with Genius Loci for dimensioning.

Generally speaking I don’t recommend starting your graph building in Dynamo. Instead use a whiteboard, pen and paper, or other tool to write out all the steps you would perform if doing this by hand.

  1. Ok I need to build the shop drawing for this assembly, so let’s get started.
  2. I need to select the elements.
  3. I need to create the relevant views of the assembly.
  4. I need to tag the parts.
  5. I need to create the relevant views of the parts.
  6. I need to …

You get the idea.

Once you have that try searching the forum for the individual sub-tasks you are after, searching for generic steps (create assembly views, sheet by views) rather than specific (create steel assembly shop drawings) as the specific is going to filter out a lot of answers to questions you don’t even know you have yet. That should be enough for you to build things out.

Don’t be afraid to ask if you get stuck with a sub-task, but always provide a data set for us to help you with (ie: a sample model with an assembly in it, the dyn showing what you tried so far, and an example of what you are after).

1 Like