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ASCE 41 - What Gives?!?

Lately I have found myself doing a lot of seismic retrofits of existing structures.

These buildings are often analyzed utilizing ASCE 41 and I have a few complaints with the standard that I have not found answers too... hopefully someone reading this site can help me out with these.

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Revit Rebar Bender

How awesome would it be to have an easy to use, rebar drafting drawing tool in revit, getting minimum bend radii for any type of rebar? For some reason Autodesk has never released one of these and you would think it would be easy low hanging fruit for them to tackle. ...

Time Histories to Response Spectrums

I have inherited an awesome project through the most unfortunate circumstances, the loss of a great engineer moving onto bigger and brighter pastures.

The project is going to be an ASCE 41 non-linear dynamic analysis and has had geotech engineers involved in picking out ground motion that represent similar ground motions that the ...

Revit Addin

Making a revit addin has been a goal of mine for some time. Yesterday I finally succeeded, complete with ridiculous names, images and tasks completed.

The addin is simple and essentially useless, it assigns walls of a certain type to a workset (Github).

Learning C#

Revit Rebar Bender - New and Improved

Above is my first functional C# revit add-in, making bending rebar at any angle an easy task. For those non-structural engineers, the smaller the piece of rebar, the smaller the allowable bend. Being able to quickly sketch rebar to scale with minimum bend radii is ...

About Page Eye Candy - Javascript and Web Dev Misery

With a desire to update my "about" page, I set out to kill two birds with one stone, a fresh new about page and learning 3d graphics in the browser. https://www.re-tug.com/about/ is built with three.js, a package built within Javascript to make 3d graphics. 

User Interface for Concrete Design Tool

After learning the basics of threejs for the about page, I set out to develop a web based concrete design tool. A video of https://www.re-tug.com/concretedesign/  in action is below:

The Functionality

I set out to make a easy to use interface ...

User Interface for Concrete Design Tool

After learning the basics of threejs for the about page, I set out to develop a web based concrete design tool. A video of https://www.re-tug.com/concretedesign/  in action is below:

The Functionality

I set out to make a easy to use interface ...

Ray Caster Algorithm

Now that the user interface for the concrete tool is up and running, I need to start working on the concrete analysis.

The first order of business is a meshing algorithm for the concrete shape. 

I do not know exactly ...

Ray Caster Algorithm

Now that the user interface for the concrete tool is up and running, I need to start working on the concrete analysis.

The first order of business is a meshing algorithm for the concrete shape. 

I do not know exactly ...

RAM API - Cracked

I finally cracked into the RAM Structural System API after maybe 3 years of wanting to get into it.

The key to getting in? More powerful googling. 

Googling "RAM Structural API" yields some very uninspiring result. Usually the results pointed to the RAM Structural API documentation that ...

RAM Structural API - A Practical Example

After unlocking the first part of the RAM API, I wanted to create a practical example of how this could be used to automate a few tedious tasks that we perform in the office.

Chord and Collector Design, A Tedious Task

I chose chord and collector design ...

The Beginnings of an ETABs Plugin

My first "Hello World" addin for ETABs is shown above. No matter how many times you see it, it is always satisfying to get Hello World to print out.

To make the addin, I followed Jeremy's examples on his website. Big thanks to him and his ...

ETABs Plugin - Part 2

Having nailed down the initial steps of creating a plugin, I set out to do some real functional work with the plugin. Being naive, I went off the deep end to begin programming the diaphragm slicer, but was quickly met by a sea of syntax ...

Diaphragm Slicer New and Improved

A long time coming... a professional level plugin for ETABs, or at least a whole lot better than the python diaphragm slicer.

User Input

Results

This plugin will allow you to slice up your diaphragm in ...

Section Cutter - ETABs Plugin

Install

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUDt8zJYAoc

How to use

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XXPHafNQQ

A major upgrade to the section cutter tool, section cuts are now centered on the first and last location where they pass through constituent area geometry. An astute engineer in our office noticed that ...

RAM to Revit (R2R) Part 1

The Tool

For a long time I’ve wanted a quick way to spot check if structural beams in our analysis models like RAM or ETABs matched our Revit model. The gif above shows the beginning of bringing this idea to life. The tool ...

SAP2000 API Example

This blog is finally starting to pay off, people are emailing with programming questions and problems. Making programming a little more accessible has always been the goal with the site. Programming can be intimidating to get started!

Foad Kondori emailed me awhile back trying to make a SAP2000 plugin to access frame reactions ...

RAM to Revit® - R2R - (part 2)

Link to trial the tool.

Above is the finished beta release R2R tool. It seems to work for large projects and should be a huge time saver and QA/QC tool as compared to manually checking RAM beams to Revit beams.

If you want to be a ...

Section Cut Tool Upgrades

The Section Cut Tool got a big upgrade:
 

• Ability to plot multiple load steps for a load case that contains multiple directions of loading.
  • Seismic X, Seismic X +e, etc.
  • Currently only supports ASCE 7-16 and ASCE 7-22 seismic loads. If ...

RAM to Revit - First Update V1.0.1

The beta release of the RAM to Revit tool has gone well. I have a few people using the tool in practice and have heard some good feedback so far. I am actively trying to maintain this and make it better, so if you have any requests, please reach out. ...

Autodesk Platform Services - A First Step

I'm not really sure what Autodesk Platform Services is or why I should use it, but Autodesk is pushing this hard it seems. The tech looks cool so I figured I would follow their first tutorial.

The first example they provide on APS is how ...

MVVM Magic and Modeless Mayhem in Revit

After making the RAM to Revit tool, I wanted to make a similiar tool, but with ETABs this time.

I learned a lot making the RAM to Revit tool, but also learned a few things that I would like to do differently given the chance. 

MVVM Magic

MVVM standards for ...

E2R - ETABS Revit Connection Tool

After the development of R2R, RAM Structural to Revit connection tool, I wanted to make an E2R, ETABS to Revit connection tool. Below are some screenshots of the newly developed tool.

I made a youtube video on how ...