shear wall design using plates

Question

Good day Everyone, 
 
 I wish to design a shear wall manually (by hand) using the output from my analysis in staad. Therefore I modeled the shear wall using plates rather than the surface option, however I find it quite difficult to get useful values for my design. I have tried drawing a line across my plates to get the force for on specific shear wall section, however it crosses several shear wall plates in my model. I am therefore unsure of the values reported under the total force table as I am currently unable to pinpoint which plate these forces correlate to. I have included my model as well as a screenshot of my results. Any assistance would be highly appreciated. 
 core no plates-shear wall design.zip

Sye · Accepted Answer

When you want to draw the cut line for a particular wall, ensure that you only have that wall in your view ( select the wall elements and go to View > View Selected Objects Only ). Change your view to a suitable elevation view so that you see the wall from the front. Now when defining the cut line, choose the option "Cut By Line" and draw the line from one edge of the wall to the other to define the local x for the line. Click above or below the line to define the local Y for the line. Your cut line will now cut only that particular wall and not any others lying in its vicinity. Ideally try to draw the line through the center of any row of plates and do NOT draw the line through the nodes of a plate mesh. 
 Do NOT use one single plate element for the wall. Break it up into a mesh of plates. When you do that the beams/columns at the edges of the wall would also be split into same number of segments. This is essential for proper connectivity between the beam/column/wall and proper transfer of loads.

Sye · Answer

Thought this may be a good topic for a wiki 
 
 communities.bentley.com/.../29627.using-results-along-line-to-cut-one-wall-excluding-others-around-it