Revit Plug-in: Automated Hanger and Seismic Bracing Layout and Design for MEP Systems

JAKE OLSEN: So my name is Jake Olson, vice president of field engineering for DEWALT. I come from a civil-structural background. I've been doing construction my whole career, consulting engineering to begin with, and then much of the product side after that

I spend a lot of my time, as do our field engineering team, working with structural engineers and working with contractors trying to find solutions, products on both sides there. So a fun place to be in the industry. I think a lot of you guys are on one side of the other and that's always-- getting right in between structural and contractors is always fun. But yes so well talk about what we're doing here.

ALAN ESPINOZA: My name is Alan Espinoza I'M A VDC modeler with MMC contractors. I, also, share a little bit similar background the civil engineering technology degree. I, also, been in construction since the ripe old age of 16, getting dirty in the ditches.

A little bit about MMC contractors we're a large mechanical contractor based out of Kansas City. As you see, we've got different locations spread out across the country. We're an employee owned company. We're, also, a union mechanical contractor, just a little bit about us.

JAKE OLSEN: So Alan and I are here today to introduce a plug-in that we've worked on for Revit. A plug-in that sits inside of Revit called DEWALT HangerWorks and this automates the design and placement of hangers and seismic bracing.

So you guys are there in this room because you're very interested in what that even means or where there's problems in the industry. And I can tell you when we first started working on this a couple of years ago, we went out to contractors and we asked the question. We started saying, hey, you know we're working on improving this workflow, there's problems, we see the problems, we're going to build some software solutions that are going to help with that hanger and bracing

So we got a-- that's a extreme, extreme close up. Whoa! That's not distracting at all.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Although, we got-- can we start over?

JAKE OLSEN: I got a pretty similar response when we first started walking in here. We walked into the contractor's office-- hey, we're building software to help with hangers. And I got almost the same response everywhere I went, DEWALT is building software for hangers. WTF, which of course, stands for well what's the functionality.

So I think it could help if I put it a little bit in context. I'm sure a lot of you guys associate DEWALT as a tool company. And indeed we are, we build great tools we've been probably longer in it than just about anybody building tools. But DEWALT has grown into a lot more than just a tool company.

One of the things that DEWALT has expanded into is hangars and anchors. In 2012, it acquired Powers Fasteners and that's where I came from. I was with Powers for over 10 years, now. And we just announced recently that we're going to wrap the DEWALT brand around that anchor and fastening line, so we've introduced DEWALT engineered by Powers as a brand. Along with that introduced a whole ton of new anchor solutions, products specifically for MEP contractors-- hanging and bracing stuff off the ceiling. So that puts it a little bit more into context of why DEWALT's interested in software and improving that workflow.

But I think it's also interesting to think about it from the contractors standpoint. So the mechanical, electrical, plumbing contractors-- an important customer both for Powers and for DEWALT-- are guys that are working on hanging things off the ceiling these types of systems, a lot of power tools, a lot of anchors, a lot of fasteners going to that application. And we've watched both from an anchoring side and a tool side, that same application has changed quite a bit.

So where we used to hang things with the ceiling, this was our customer up on a ladder hammer drill putting in anchors, today it's much more of this person. Now they're achieving the same thing, they're putting in hangers to suspend MEP systems, but it's a different set of tools. It's a different set of products. So for us as a tool and anchor manufacturer we need to make sure we understand what's going on here and solve the problems that these guys are facing.

Same thing from a layout standpoint. So I go back 10 years and this was very much my customer, this was the guy that was putting in anchors and hangers trying to suspend systems. And today, again, that's changed, this is what that guy looks like today. So guys and gals out using things like robotic total stations. So again same concept hanging, anchoring, bracing-- new tools, new ideas, new technology and, of course, as that being our key customer whether it's a DEWALT power tool or an anchor. We need to make sure we understand that, we're looking for problems, we're making those workflows better. I mean, that's very much a job site of today. I'm sure those of you in this room are probably in this room because you understand that.

What making that possible? Modelling, creating models of what we're actually going to go out and install allows us to place hangers, to place anchors, to do that stuff in advance. So this modeling has really changed, especially if you talk to mechanical, electrical, plumbing contractors. One of the big benefits you get from modeling is, actually, the ability to place hangers in advance. That's one of the big use cases for creating the model for any of these systems. Certainly something like a PT deck or something, I mean if you're not placing your hangers in advance you're in trouble. You're crossing your fingers drilling or you're scanning, I mean not a lot of solutions.

So, again, from DEWALT 's standpoint understanding what's going on they're trying to look for solutions that's in our DNA to understand our customers, our end users, our contractors and try to build better products and better solutions. Working with them and we want to build products with our contractors, not for our contractors. So when we went out to solve this hanger and bracing problem we made sure we were working with the industry we were very happy to find Alan. I think when we knocked on your door and said we're building software for hangers and bracing I think that was the interest of yours.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Yeah, I was definitely interested and probably a lot of us are CAD MEP users, fabrication. We have the ability to place hangers and it's still a very cumbersome process. We can hit a button have it have in place, but there's no way to truly check to see how they're designed. We have to take into account the load of the pipe that we're supporting, of the conduit, or the duct.

So we're a lot of times going through-- unless you guys have a structural engineer that's going through and looking at every hanger scenario that you have-- you're turning to maybe a B-Line book to your strut And, me personally, just taking structural analysis classes, I don't feel comfortable saying, OK, I looked at this chart, I'm probably supposed to use this. But I would feel more comfortable if I actually knew the point loads on this piece of Unistrut. What's the max deflection of that piece of Unistrut or my lower attachment that I'm using?

So HangerWorks is in the process and is going to help us increase our efficiencies there.

JAKE OLSEN: So I think Alan has been a great person to bounce ideas off of. I can speak, I think, to a lot of contractors in the room that are having problems with hangers and bracing in BIM, in their models. And I'll tell a couple of stories of stuff that I've seen from what I've done.

So we were involved with the big data center project and this was a highly coordinated project, so everything was modeled. All the contractors had to submit models, lots of coordination process. If you guys have worked in the data center there's a lot of, a lot of stuff that goes into those very, very coordinated project.

So through one of the electrical contractors, in this case it was using our anchors to do all their hanging. And throughout the coordination meetings this was a project where there was a lot of coordination and the structural engineer was involved directly in the coordination meetings. And during the course of those coordination meetings, reviewing the model, and then working out clashes, and moving stuff around and the structural engineers sees these massive conduit racks, multi-tier, massive racks. And it's these guys are going through their typical process of working stuff out and says, well, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second that's a big rack I mean, how much load is on that. Those are 4 inch conduits, 3 tier 4 inch conduits what kind of load is going back on the structure? And hold the phone here, I'm not sure we have enough strength in our floor and beam system to support that. So the structural engineer asked the electrical contractor to submit the point loads and this was more or less the scratch on the record. Oh, those point loads.

So again, a highly coordinated project everything was modeled. The electrical contractor had to go out and hire an engineer to calculate point loads. The engineer that was going to do the point loads didn't want a model, they wanted a 2D plan set to do that. And this is not a joke, so we spent all this time coordinating all this and creating this beautiful model. What the electrical contractor gotten back was a set of 2D-- actually a roll of plans with handwritten point loads on it.

ALAN ESPINOZA: I thought it was a PDF. It wasn't a PDF?

JAKE OLSEN: Hand written point loads across the model. So that electrical contractor had to go in and enter all of that back into the model, submit that to the structural to put the point loads where they were in the system, the structural engineer reruns the structural analysis and finds all sorts of problems. So floor, overloaded floor slabs, overloaded beams I think 17% of the structural members were actually overloaded. And hundreds of the hangers were overloaded and that's the same story.

So a big problem. And how many contractors in here have worked on the job that it had a specs section that says something like this, submit to the structural review all support location, point loads, and structural attachment details. How many people took that spec section through it over their shoulder and hoped that nobody ever asked for those. Here's another one. This is a job we just working on. This is a point load limit throughout the floor, so maximum point load on floor slab 600 pounds.

From my standpoint, like I said, I spent a lot of time in structural engineers offices this is increasing from what I've seen. Structural engineers are understanding. I mean, the BIM process for modeling things is great. It allows us to route things more efficiently, it allows us to take what used to be a distributed mess of conduit and pull it together and get it on a rack. And build a multi-tier trapeze. All of those benefits you get out of BIM are great, that's what you want to do you want to build the model and think about routing things smartly in design. However, one of the consequences of that is as we build these big racks and these big systems is that they get heavier. And it can create a problem for the structural side of things and structural engineers like us that are waking up to this. I'm sure that you guys have been involved where you need to submit point loads, so, from our standpoint of sitting in between that, we see a lot of problems with the point load requirements and then actually getting that design done properly.

Alan, I think, from a contractor standpoint you could probably share a similar story.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So we did, we actually had a very similar story. So we were supporting from joists, we were in a penthouse area where the roof was above us. We couldn't support out of the roof deck, so the engineers are sitting in our coordination meetings as well and they're starting to see how much we actually have in the model and they're actually starting to see where those hangars are located. So they're pausing and saying, whoa, just the same way. They are saying, wait a minute, we're not so sure that the design is going to work for this, so can you submit us drawing full of point loads.

And us being a mechanical contractor we're like, hold on a second that wasn't part of our bid that wasn't our scope of work. We really don't want to do that, so we compromised on something we sent them a drawing with line sizes and then pointing out where our hangers were. So now we've done work that we wouldn't normally do. And, I don't know about you guys, but in your CAD budgets you probably don't have to have a ton of time on projects, you're always behind. On their end they didn't have time in the job either, so we end up sending them to PDF. They get it, they review it, and it's a pretty long process for them to go through because it's not just us it's all the other trades on the project. So one week goes by, hey, did anybody hear about the analysis. Two weeks, three weeks, and I think it ended up being four weeks by the time we had got anything back.

So it turned out that they had to go through and beef up some of the joists to properly support all the MEP systems. So time from us, and time from them wasn't planned out. And that can, potentially, impact schedule.

JAKE OLSEN: So why aren't we doing a better job with this as an industry. Why is this such a black hole? I mean, for me understanding loads, properly designing hangers, anchors, rods is always one of these. I go to the structural engineer-- who's responsible for designing those anchors at the top of those conduit racks. Structural says, that's not my job, [INAUDIBLE], pass it down. Go to the contractor and they say the same thing-- hey, are you guys designing those anchors, oh, no that's a structural thing, we don't design those, it's one of those situations.

Best case scenario somebody might be looking at some table values, perhaps they might be trying to look up and size things for tables. Maybe they've got a strut table or something, where they're trying to get this thing sized properly, but I would say that's a best case scenario. And even that's not easy to do because tables usually don't address all the various conditions we see. I mean it's certainly a multi-tier trapeze gets complicated and how to properly calculate and size that.

I mean, I can tell you from an anchoring standpoint there's definitely a misconception in the market that I've seen. A lot of people I think size anchors based on the size of the rod, so I've got a big rack, half inch rod. What do I put at the top of that, I put a half inch anchor. Why? Well because I have a half inch rod, not looking at really how much the anchor itself can support or can hold. And just to put that in context, if I have a half inch rod and one of these typical cast-in-place anchors, some of you guys are probably used, and I just pull on it the anchor will fail around 4500 pounds. It'll rip out of the concrete where the rod will not fail until 8500 pounds.

So in a lot of cases just sizing things based on the rods is not sufficient, it's not enough. There is a whole building code section on how to properly size those anchors, but it's complicated. I mean, concrete's a squirelly material. There's a lot of work that has to go in the sizing those. And when you've got a project with tens of thousands of hanger points and anchors it's just not practical, there is not an easy way to do that.

You think that's bad, struts are even worse. So maybe something more that looks like a distributed load we can start looking in our old beam-- any structural guys can look into their beam tables. But getting deflection on a multi-point load across a piece of strut or stress that's not a simple calculation. And this will be different than this. That's a different loading on the strut and on the anchors, which is different again from this if I move the pipe to that side. And maybe you're going to get that figured out, wait until you put a seismic into the mix. Throw all of that out the window because that just makes it more complicated, again.

So this isn't being done today because it's complicated and we see that with seismic. If you guys have ever looked at some of these-- I mean from a structural standpoint recently earthquakes, our buildings are standing up pretty well, but all that stuff inside the buildings are still having a lot of problems. Things are not being hung and braced properly to deal with the seismic loads, again it's complicated. There's a whole chapter in the building code that talks about how to properly hang and brace things, but it is really a lot of calculation that has to go on to do that properly. So it's not something natively that a contractor, in particular, wants to do. Structural engineers don't want to do it. There are a lot of pain points here and getting things properly hung and braced.

And I can tell you when we talk about modeling, there's a real broken workflow in BIM. And I'm sure some of you guys-- let's see if this resonates, but here's the here's the modeling workflow for seismic that I typically see. So contractors start the job, they're going to model everything. They want to get anchors into the deck ahead of time, they go through their modeling, and they get their first pass gone, set. They start coordination with the other trades, they start working as things start moving around, and they might even start hanging first floor second floor equipment.

Once they've got a pretty dialed in model where they think things aren't going to move any more, we got most of our clashes worked out, then they go out and they hire somebody to start trying to figure out how to hang and how to brace that, and how to add the seismic components to that. And at that point it's usually, hey, I need this in 24 hours or 48 hours. I got to get my seismic. it's a broken process and a lot of that happens completely outside of the model. So we've done all this work to model everything and then for seismic you're asking somebody to come in at the very end of that process and try to figure out how to hang your brace your system. And by that point a lot of times there's so much junk in the way duct and pipe and other trades in the way, you can't do an efficient job of putting that bracing in.

So we're not thinking about that upfront, we're not modeling it up front. And that's because, like I said, it's complicated I mean, how many times do you get seismic plans back and, I mean, they're just 2D plans. I think mirrors your experience.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So right now we have a project going on and our lead on the project is starting to talk to the seismic consultant. And they're trying to figure out a workflow to use. So what they've done so far is they've gone through and he gave him a contract document, as an example. And he's, OK, here's where all your braces. Well everybody knows a contract document and your coordination model are probably not going to match all that much, depending on your delivery type.

But I just see this kind of unraveling into what I call the ping pong effect. I'll hit the file over to you, hit file back, hit the file back, OK, we got it dialed in. So I just see that as an other broken workflow.

JAKE OLSEN: So one of the big problems by not doing that natively in the model is you lose all the benefits of modeling to begin with. So all the things you want to do with a well coordinated, well detail model. When I've got seismic and living in a completely different place, I can't do that. So what do I want out of that model, I want actionable output. I want to be able to create sheets for my prefab shop, cut lengths for strut and rod. I want to be able to create a bill of materials so that I can do estimating and quoting and purchasing from. I want my points. How many jobs have you been on when all the gravity hangers are set with your total station, but you've got to go back and drill in the seismic points because those weren't coordinated on time in the model.

It's a broken process today. By now getting that bracing in up front you lose all the benefits of modeling that stuff to begin with. And, for me, a big one is the engineering piece, too. We've got all that stuff in our model, but we don't have any real justification in the model that we did it correctly. When somebody stops and says, the record scratch stops and says, hey, where's the point loads? You're completely out of that-- all that beautiful modeling you did you don't have any data in there to solve some of the engineering problems. So in order to do this, in order to create good submittals and good engineering information we need to not just be modeling generic hangers and components. We need to build really product specific hangers, components of seismic bracing. So what we'll show you with HangerWorks is we've built a database of components, so from a DEWALT standpoint, we do all the anchors, all the upper attachments. But we wanted to make sure that for you guys, for contractors you've got all the components that you need all the typical brands you work with, they assemble, your braces, your hangers, your whether it's wire, or cable, or strut. So what we'll show you here is a program that builds hangers that have real content from all the suppliers you are probably used to working with. And that allows me to do engineering, it allows me to do some middles, it allows me to do all the stuff that you guys like to do. So I think we all understand the problem, let's show you what we did here with the solution. So Alan's going to jump into HangerWorks here and we'll walk you through how this solves some of those workflow problems.

ALAN ESPINOZA: All right, so I just put a demo model together showing, highlighting what you see on a normal project different types of scenarios. Oh, sorry. There we go.

OK, so, like I said, I put together a model. I'm going to go ahead and close this view. So, you guys, how many Fabrication Academy P users do we have? Quite a bit. So is anybody thinking about switching to Revit anytime soon? Using fabrication parts, families? Kyle, what are you going to do?

So. We've we're seeing how Revit is evolving with fabrication parts. And how those are acting more and more native to Revit, being example of families.

Now, let's say your an engineer and you guys have spent a lot of time developing all of your families. And you don't want to just throw that all out the window. Well, Hanger works with both families and fabrication parts. So I'm going to go ahead and select this run. This is fabrication parts I have a couple of the six inch show waterlines, and a couple of heating hot waterlines. Four inch.

So I'm just going to highlight it. I don't have to use a filter. I get my button that pops up. Hit the hangers coming in. So what's going on here which is different from Hanger Tools you guys may have tried is, while these hangers have been built out of those components and placed, the engineering behind them is happening as well. So every piece of strut is being checked for bending, for stress, for deflection. Every anchor is being calculated according to the code requirements. So that's happening as Hangar Works is building those Hangar assemblies.

So what you get in the model, then, is not a generic hanger or generic points. You've got specific products. Those are product-specific built hangars. And what you see is what also gets embedded in the model, is all the information you would like, such as point loads and calculations. That gets built as those hangars are getting placed.

So, really, the special sauce here is you guys probably know, is when you pull either Fabrication content or native Revit content, when you look at those, they're dimensionally correct but they don't have weights associated with them that you would need. So if Alan grabs one of those, you can see we're not just looking at the pipe in the sense of it being a pipe of this diameter. Hangar Works assigns weights to these pipes, and that allows us to do the calculations that we need.

So take Conduit, for example. I don't want to base my hangar and anchor calcs on the way to the conduit. I'm going to base it on the weight of the filled conduit with the conductors. So Hanger Works looks at every system in there and it assigns the proper weight to it.

Now there's cases certainly where that weight-- we may not want a 100% filled conduit. Or if you're working on a job where you have to fill the conduit with water, if you guys have ever dealt with that. So you also have the ability in here to redefine the weights if you don't like what we assign to it. But I would say for the 99% use case, these are the proper weights. Water-filled pipe, conductor-filled conduit. Those are the weights that we assign to these things that allow us to do the calculations.

And this thing needed to be dynamic in the sense that not every pipe that we draw or install is filled with water. Yes. So this needed to have the ability to go through and assign different material types that way. So you can select all your systems, select the proper material type and then all your fill weights are based off of that.

So let's say we're done with hangers, we're starting to coordinate hangars and get everything dialed in. We're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel in our trade coordination. So I am just going to go ahead and open up a plan view here.

And let's say we have to move a hangar for whatever reason. First of all, I want to show you guys something that I think is pretty cool. We've got different loads associated with this hangar. I'm not sure if you guys can see that or not back there, but we've got-- support tension one has a load of, in this instance, 325 pounds. And that's because it's supporting the two 6-inch pipes versus the two 4-inch pipes. Two 4-inch pipes is now supporting in this instance 280 pounds. With a total gravity load of 604 pounds.

So let's say I had to move this hangar, I don't know, 10 inches to avoid something. So now, that total gravity load is now 584.9 pounds. So all of the hangars in the model are being updated and as we move things around. So if I'm sitting in a coordination meeting and somebody says "Hey, you've got to move, I got a pipe running through there. It gives you, as a detailer, as an engineer, the information you need to move those. I can drag that thing to some point. And as soon as it goes over capacity, as soon as I fail that anchor, it's going to tell you, "Hey, look, you've moved it too far".

So if I'm trying to work out clashes, it gives you-- I mean, you guys have all probably said in there, "Hey, you got to move". And you're nervously saying, "OK, I think I could move and not really know" because you're changing the stresses on the system, you're changing your span distances. You're changing the load on those anchors. So by this thing being dynamic, if you see what Alan just did, he's got a color coding filter set up here, right? So when I've dragged that too far for my strut is now overloaded. It tells him, "Hey, look. That's not a good way to avoid that clash. Don't stretch out that strut or you're going to have to go back and redesign it". So it gives you really intuitive output on how to move things around. How much you can move things around before you get into trouble with the structural side.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So how does all this, what I call magic, happen? When I first started getting involved and seeing how HangerWorks actually worked, there was a need to separate the cable tray from the conduit, the conduit from the duct, and the duct from the pipe. Because they are all hung separately. They all have their own specific standards or specifications. So what I like about this is you can create your settings and you can import and export them. They could be project-specific or they can be specification-based.

So you can go into the [INAUDIBLE] or the MSA 58's or the [INAUDIBLE] rules. You can build those out and import and export. Or if you--

JAKE OLSEN: One of the things working with--

ALAN ESPINOZA: Go ahead.

JAKE OLSEN: One of the things we realized right out of the gate was, we wanted just to hard-code in the [INAUDIBLE] spacing requirements, or NFPA and we realized that even though those are the rules perhaps by NFPA, there's guys who like to hang stuff, you might talk to a person who puts two hangers on every pipe no matter what. Even though you have maybe a six foot piece of pipe they're still going to put two hangers because that's how they like to fit things up. So rather than making those hard-coded rules out of the codes, we've opened it up for flexibility so you can build templates in as your firm likes to build things.

Now, you're always going to be limited by the codes. It's not going to let you do things that are not code compliant from anchor standpoint or for a stress standpoint. But it allows you to set up your own customizations. I want to hang it within six inches of a union. That type of stuff. You can identify that per system. Per trade.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So I'm not going to go through every one of these tabs and bore you to death. But I'll come back to the engineering. I just want to hit on a couple here. So under the project, this inherits whatever is in Revit.

So right now I have two levels in the project. It's reading what my elevation is. That's dictating and telling the upper attachment where to go. So if you have a metal deck like in the instance here, you can tell, do you want it to go to the upper floor of the deck? And most of the time we want to do that. Another thing is the deck profile.

So if we look at the deck profile, this is going to tell us is it going to be wood-formed or is it going to be metal deck, and what kind of metal deck, how thick is the concrete going to be and how tall is the metal deck going to be.

JAKE OLSEN: Remember we're not just placing generic Hangar content. We're building engineered calculations, so I'm not just sticking point for you to go out and shoot your total station. I need to know what type of fastener that is. So I need to know if I'm going to have a PT slab, a metal deck, so I can do those calculations. So these settings are going to pull from that database of products and put the right products in the model that can be built properly.

Another nice to have there if you could jump back real quick is you can set point load limits per floor. So how many guys have run into a point load limitation on a roof. You get up to the roof level and you've got this really tight point load limit. So I can say on my roof level I've got a 400 pound point load limit. Don't place any hangars in this model that go over 400 pounds. So it lets me identify that per floor, which is a pretty common issue, especially on the lighter gauge stuff when you get up to the top of the building.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So then we're just going to move kind of to show the product-specific items in here. So here we have some dual anchors. If I want to disable, let's say, our firm hardly ever uses quarter inch rod, I could just filter that out and say I don't want to use that. And we're going to use that 3/4 inch rod, or a 3/4 inch in this instance.

JAKE OLSEN: So you can turn on and off libraries, whatever you're used to building your stuff out of. You can turn those on and off and that allows what's left in the library is what Hangar Works solves when it goes in and it builds that content.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Just kind of shown a little bit of Anvil. We look at the clavice hangers here from their catalog. It's pretty robust. And then just some of the I'm going to just go to the pipe type because I'm a little biased. But this is just kind of showing you where you set all your spacing rules based on material types. So you can go in and set all that up.

So next, we got to start producing deliverables out to the field. I'm going to drag this up a little bit here. Yes, sure.

AUDIENCE: Whenever we stretch that out and [INAUDIBLE]

JAKE OLSEN: Right.

AUDIENCE: And pre-run everything and it will update it with a more [INAUDIBLE]

JAKE OLSEN: Even better, you can resize that single. Right.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So I come down here and I could change my lower attachment.

JAKE OLSEN: So it will tell you where-- correct. So it'll tell you where your error is. I've got a bending problem on my strut. I've got an anchor problem. And you can fix those problems. So you can set up your filters to highlight where your errors are. And then you come back and you fix the problems rather than trying to rerun everything again. So very user-friendly in that sense of fixing the problems. Eric.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. When you showed the different libraries, I saw that you had costed that.

JAKE OLSEN: We do. I'll talk about that a little bit later. But there's a lot of obviously opportunity there to look at how do I best hang the system. For example, a question that might come up is, is it smarter to hang everything with three inch rod? Or should it use half inch drive, or should I do a mix of both? I can look at 3 A rod. I might have to pull my spacing in a little bit. And maybe I can get longer spacing. But the components cost more.

So there's installation labor. There's cost in data. That allows me to do those what-if analysis. What's the best way to hang this system? Again, that's the type of stuff that's very hard to, intuitively as a modeler, to answer those questions right now.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So I'm just going to show you, guys. This is the schedules that I have in my template right now. I just have three. I'm just going to click on what I like to call-- there is a few easy buttons and don't tell our field we have easy buttons, because they already think everything we do is easy. So this is producing schedules within Revit. It is using native Revit schedules. And it's producing a few different-- these are preloaded when you download. So I'm going to click OK. You notice now that all those schedules populated under the Schedules tab.

So let's say I wanted to look at the bill of materials for the trapeze hangers. It's pretty hard to see all those numbers, but it gives me a count, prefab ID, and I will kind of talk to you a little bit later about what I like about that. Again, it goes into the costing. And if you have your shop and field labor filled out for each component, you can definitely do that. And it's just going to tell you.

It's really just leveraging all the data that you have here, your cut rods of individual lengths, and your cut length of strut. Oh, yeah. Those are all even numbers, too.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ALAN ESPINOZA: We're coming.

JAKE OLSEN: We will get there. We will get there. That's when we-- I have the balloon drop and everything.

[LAUGHS]

ALAN ESPINOZA: So another deliverable that we would send out. So fabricating. I'm sure a lot of you guys do reports for your hanger's, sending it to the shop if you're fabbing hangers. So I don't know. I like having a little bit more visual effects when I send these out. So I'm just going to generate some sheets here. What this is doing is it's generating schedules for all the different hanger types. So I may have a TPZ 1-14, but there's a hundred of those on the project. So what it's doing is it's combining all those single instances and it's saying, OK, you have a hundred of these So instead of having a long list of, saying, 100 times, having 100 line items, essentially. I really like this functionality here.

JAKE OLSEN: So one of the-- working again, trying to help contractors be more efficient, improve their workflows. Prefabrication of hangers was a big one. That's a lot of-- some guys are really good at it already but a lot of people are trying to figure out how to get a better prefabrication workflow for hanger's.

So building in this type of sheet that can go straight down to your fab shop makes it very easy to do struck cut lengths, broad cut lengths, build out your hangar assemblies that can be sent straight out to the field.

So you've got one of these sheets here?

ALAN ESPINOZA: I'm going to show this, side by side here. So if I go look at one of these hangers. Let's say that one. That's categorized as a TPZ 1-14. So if I go to click on the sheet and look at a TPZ 1-14 is, it's going to give me just a basic image of what that looks like. And I ran this the other day and if I have a rod that's lower than the other, it's actually going to show that picture. Which I thought was really awesome.

It's also going to associate dimensional data for that hangar. So you don't have to sit there and annotate your hangers. I know you could do it in a report but, again, I'd like to give a visual of as to what the person in the field is actually going to be building.

So these A dimensions, B dimensions that you see are associated with the schedule up on your sheet. Like A, for instance, if I go that's cut-rod length for rod 1. So if I have varying lengths of rod, I'm going to get that in my schedule.

So, just to keep running with this example here. Let's say I have TPZ 1-14, go back into my model. I'm going to bring this over here so I can actually see what's going on. So I have that selected. So let's say in my 3D model, for whatever reason, I've got to change that length of rod. So I'm going to attach it to a beam.

JAKE OLSEN: Right now he's got 16 of this type of hangar assembly, and four of this type of hangar assembly.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Right. So when I do that, it said, "OK, I'm no longer a TPZ 114-002, I'm now a TPZ 114-003. So it's dynamically changing and knowing when changes are occurring. And this right here is like a huge-- this thing is awesome, right here. This, I love this.

JAKE OLSEN: That's right. Speechless.

So we promised these guys seismic.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Yeah, you want to do some seismic?

JAKE OLSEN: Let's do some seismic. Come on. Come on.

AUDIENCE: Real seismic.

JAKE OLSEN: Let's get some seismic.

ALAN ESPINOZA: So we're just going to-- what's up?

AUDIENCE: Whenever it's drawing hangers, does it automatically try to avoid hangers under or above, or does it just go in spacing requirements as needed and then you adjust and--

JAKE OLSEN: Let me-- let me.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Jonathan, what was like one of the first things I said that you should do?

JAKE OLSEN: Avoid. Avoid. So, these will actually attache to, let's say we have a beam, it's going to find that model category of a beam. And it's capable of shortening of one rod and let's say you don't have a beam on the other one. So in my mind, why can't you do the inverse of that? That's on the development team's list.

As of today, if you've got structural steel, it'll be clamps.

ALAN ESPINOZA: But it's not going to self-coordinate.

AUDIENCE: Offside? Accordingly, off the beams, not necessarily--

JAKE OLSEN: Yeah. Because you can't be on the center of the beam, you got to be off to the edge and you set your offset. So that's built in today for beam clamps. The idea of, hey, I only want to do anchors, or I only want to do beam clamps, or make this work. Certainly doable. And I'll talk a little bit about where this whole thing is going. But right now, it's very dynamic in the sense of whatever's above, whatever type of fastener needs to be there, it'll put it in, do the calcs, make sure that it's got the right type of product in place. Yep.

AUDIENCE: Question. When you want to attach [INAUDIBLE]

JAKE OLSEN: Yes. Similar type of question where you want to force it to attach to--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JAKE OLSEN: Yeah. So same question. Right now, it's going to base that spacing more on what it needs to support the pipe properly and then put the right attachments up above. But I'll talk about our future less than a minute here. But that one where I say, "Hey, look I only want to use beam clamps on this building maybe because concrete's already pouring and we don't have time to do it. That is absolutely doable. Not going to be in the release. And I'll talk about some of the stuff that we're going to build out

AUDIENCE: Does it automatically [INAUDIBLE]

JAKE OLSEN: Yes. So any time you change a hanger assembly, it re-calcs. So I've got the weights associated with the pipes. And the weights on the hanger points are tributary. You know, whatever I've got going off. And when the plug-in sense is a change in the hangar location spacing, it does a recalculation. So if I drag a hanger, if I move a hanger. So it's a dynamic calculation.

ALAN ESPINOZA: Let's say I delete a hanger for whatever reason. Notice how all my pipes turned red and this one turned purple? So based on my filters, this is telling me that these pipes aren't supported right now. And that this hanger is supporting two much weight in that instance.