rebar and AECOsim

What do you want to do? Simple 2D rebar drawings, or 3D?

Whatever can be considered best practice.

I'm not entirely sure, but from what I've seen from programs like power rebar or autocad structural detailing, they are simple when it comes to drawing the 2D and have some tools to extract quantities and produce rebar reports. If that's the case the only advantage I see in having 3D is being able to use clash detection, which is only really useful in some more complicated detailing situations.

I'm not sure about the update of the rebar if there is any geometry change to the concrete elements doe. From my experience, power rebar and DV don't go very well together. PR needs simple elements to work - the concrete faces have to be lines, arcs, etc. The DV's produce cells (or something like that) and I have to merge all the attaches and drop the geometry to simpler elements to be able to work with PR. This makes the drawing dumb and any update to geometry means repeating the process and making PR also dumb.
If 3D would improve on this problems would be good, but I think that may be a little bit of a stretch to the ABD capacities. At least for now.

Unknown said:

programs like power rebar or autocad structural detailing, they are simple when it comes to drawing the 2D ... If that's the case the only advantage I see in having 3D is being able to use clash detection

What about the supposed great advantage of modeling in 3D, with the 2D a dynamic extraction from that, so the 2D is always automatically in sync?

It amazes me how readily everyone lets go of that ideal and resorts to doing important stuff as embelishment on the 2Ds. That way, it stays in sync with model changes only as long as someone is alert enough to comprehensively update all the 2Ds manually.

If that's good enough, why not just stick to 2D Acad?

Fostertom (Tom Foster maybe?), You are absolutely right. Of course the 3D is the best solution, since it would keep everything in sync and be able to extract drawings and bills, but rebar in AECOsim?

I explored just a little bit about what Steve said, but it looks to me, so far, that there is no way of introducing any type of rebar information directly into AECOsim (again, I'm not totally sure, please correct me if I'm wrong). For that, it's necessary to use the ISM and import that information from elsewhere (prostructures, ram, staad....

This is very odd to me (and again, I'm not absolutely sure) because I don't understand how AECOsim has Architectural, Electrical, Mechanical AND STRUCTURAL, but this last one is almost a mere expansion of the architectural... I understand that there are other apps for the structural model, but does that really make sense? Why having a Structural AECOsim if all it actually does is using the information from other apps? If I'm using AECO already to work in other departments I have to use ProStructures also, that does everything that the Structural AECO does, and a little bit more? It seems like a waste of money, gigabytes, and just more workflow background noise.

Steve,
this was intended for you too, please let me know if I'm not understanding the way AECOsim deals with rebar.

We are in the beginning of a process of switching from 2D to 3D modelling of reinforcement. We have tested both Revit and Tekla, and have did also a couple of meetings with other companies in the same situation as we are. We went Tekla, as it seems to be the most mature 3D software for reinforcement drawings. Revit doesn't have anything useful yet - or as the Revit guys I have talked to are saying: "The latest releases are not as hopeless as they used to be".

My personal opinion right now I can't really say that 3D reinforcement is a big gain.

It is very good when it comes to simple, geometric objects like beams, columns, foundations and so on. For those purposes there are predefined, parametric objects which are extremely fast to use.

The story is different for non standard objects like slabs with a difficult geometry. Here you end up doing very much manually.

Another thing is that in 3D you more or less have to do the job twice. First modelling everything in 3D, and then do the layout in a 2D drawing.

When doing 2D reinforcement drawings, you do the job just once.

As for the moment, I'd assume that we use 20-40% more time doing 3D reinforcement drawings as we were doing 2D. But of course we are just at the very beginning of the implementation.

Hi Pedro,

ABD (and Structural Modeler before it) were not designed with Rebar as a requirement.   And to be honest, in the years I've been at Bentley, actual 3D modeling of Rebar has pretty much been a non-factor.  That's why it was designated as a detailing feature instead when originally introduced a few years back.   However, it will read Rebar data when importing from analysis packages where it is a requirement. 

FWIW, the Structural side of ABD goes beyond being an expansion of Architecture: Structural data properties, analysis and design parameters, shared MDB section databases (from STAAD.Pro), ISM, non-analysis translations such as CIS/2 and SDNF, Spreadsheet reporting, Structural Drawing Rules, etc.   All of these have no real counterpart on the Architectural side, nor should they!    :)

This is all good and clarifying.

This is all good and clarifying.