Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Unit Testing in Revit

Just saw this post from Jeremy Tammik - The Building Coder, referencing Daren Thomas' post about Unit Testing Revit plugins using his RevitPythonShell. Looking forward to trying it out.

Fire protection

So we link the structural steel model into our architectural model.

We don’t want to draw beam casings. We want to assign fire protection to steelwork.

We want to assign different types of fire protection in different areas: Intumescent paint here, boxings there. Fire ratings vary across the building.

We want to illustrate the fire protection solution in plans and elevations. Probably with colour. Possibly with dashed lines and symbols.

We may want to measure quantities: Areas, lengths and thicknesses. Some sections need protection on all four sides. Others are partially protected by floors or walls, and so only need partial protection. Coating and board thicknesses will vary depending on the fire rating, the steel section properties, and the exposed area (and on the coating or board ratings of course).

Any boxings need to show up in the 3D model and in plan and section, and join intelligently to the walls, floors, etc.  Coatings don’t take up much space, but do affect the surface appearance of the steel.

When we move from the structural design engineer’s model to the fabricator’s model, our fire protection needs to transition from one to the other. When we issue our model to the constructor, the fire protection information needs to go with it, no matter which steel model he’s using.

Ah, and I was lying when I said we want to assign fire protection to steelwork. We actually want to establish some principles for fire protecting this structure, all code-compliant of course. And then we want the software to go off and optimise a fire protection solution.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Hello, hello

Is this thing working?