The Fastest Way to Model Rebars for Buildings and Infrastructure Projects

ANDRE OANCEA: Hello, everyone. I am happy and honored to be present here in front of all Revit experts today I know how much interest there is on the other side of the software development in production, in optimization of workflows when it comes to deliverables for reinforcement. Your presence here today confirms this.

Let's see what is the fastest way to model rebars for building and infrastructure projects. But before that, let's meet. I am for the second time speaker at Autodesk University. I've held a presentation during the pandemic in 2021 for the German Autodesk public and then present for the first time here in Las Vegas.

I am working in the Product Management Team at SOFiSTiK. And I'm responsible for the applications for detailing reinforcement and formwork on Revit and AutoCAD platforms. My first contact with Revit started around 10 years ago. And a couple of years before, I was using SOFiCAD, which is a group of tools from SOFiSTiK for reinforcement and for more detailing on AutoCAD. Back then, I was on the other end of the software. I was a user of the product.

So right after finishing my studies at Technical University of Civil Engineering in Bucharest, I started to work as drafting engineer in an Austrian company. To be honest I always like to improve things in AutoCAD and look for alternative solutions. This is very, very easy to be done in both AutoCAD and Revit.

I like how the door is being left open for the user to find his own way if the out-of-the-box solution is not suitable for him or his project. You can imagine that I was not very happy as I started to learn about reinforcement modeling options in Revit. This was around 2015. I thought that it should be more than starting from 2D detailing of reinforcement.

The gaming industry is evolving. Everything is so real in the games nowadays. I told myself how come that we, the detailing engineers, must struggle so much? And, first, imagine the reinforcement solution in our minds, and then draw it, transfer that information in to the sheets.

Later, around five years ago, I joined the SOFiSTiK team as Product Manager. And it was easier for me to gain a fresh perspective and see from this point of view, what are the challenges when it comes to developing the perfect solution for modeling rebars and detailing it?

I would like to use the opportunity to thank the Autodesk Revit team for the effort they put in enhancing everything related to reinforcement, and not only, of course. Every feature and step you have taken in development has led to today's result. And we at SOFiSTiK are grateful for that and, I think, also other Revit users.

We also thank you for your constant collaboration and willingness to resolve the situation we are facing. This is a list of a couple of features that were very welcomed in the latest versions of Revit.

Let's get down to concrete things, so, more specifically, reinforced-concrete things, and the reason why am present here before you today. SOFiSTiK Reinforcement, as known as RC, is very well known in the German market for detailing and annotation tools it has.

Lately, after the link between analytical and physical model was changed in Revit to help-- I mention this only to help you envision a milestone in time. We merged the product, SOFiSTiK Reinforcement Detailing, or CD, and SOFiSTiK Reinforcement Generation, or CG, in one product simply called SOFiSTiK Reinforcement.

We are in permanent contact with our users. And we noticed high demand, also, in modeling reinforcement, not only annotating. So we redirected our energy in designing tools in this direction.

Before jumping to features from SOFiSTiK, I want to present you today, let me please point out the main feature from Revit, which API we are using. The most complex one, I guess we can say, it is the rebar constraints which go hand in hand with the concrete cover, this one being a property of reinforcement host.

To be able to adjust the templates used by SOFiSTiK Reinforcement, you should be able to manipulate the rebar constraint and understand their behavior.

After the behavior of rebars with its constraints was implemented in Revit, it was inevitable to expect something like propagating rebars. Propagate by host or propagate by phase in a project after you already reinforced one element is one of my favorite developments lately.

This is what I actually expected to find in Revit five years ago when I started it to-- yeah, this was almost 10 years ago when I started to learn about Revit. So my bad, sorry.

And, finally, let's talk about the rebar templates. The development from SOFiSTiK brought in the SOFiSTiK Reinforcement product. Rebar template allows the user to create the necessary catalogs for standard elements SOFiSTiK reinforcement comes out of the box with some predefined catalogs.

But we are convinced that no two engineers in the same office can agree 100% on one solution so it was absolutely mandatory to offer 100% flexibility, of course. And we thought about how we could please everyone so that it would involve as little as possible effort onboarding with this feature.

Yeah, you see how easy it is to propagate and reinforce these simple concrete elements. Select the cage you want to propagate in your project from the browser and click on the host. And that's it.

To be able to list in the rebar templates browser, the user-customized catalogs, you can set the path to your saved Revit files, which later will be used as catalogs. Then in Revit, we have everything at our fingertips.

From the moment I have defined in those catalogs every constraint, how I want to behave, every layout rule how I want. Then my catalog is 99% ready to be used by SOFiSTiK reinforcement. What should I pay attention to? It's very simple. Since Revit allows me to propagate reinforcement cage after a certain phase or host, we take full advantage of this and make it available in our catalog, as well.

So with the help of SOFiSTiK Reinforcement, I can propagate in my current project, reinforcement from external projects. The previously-specified folder is the path to the user catalogs. And each Revit file is a catalog.

With a comment parameter, you define the names of the reinforcement cages inside of your catalogs, which you intend to propagate later. Seeing the first screenshot, how the host and stirrup is selected, and they have the same comment, which reflects in the rebar template browser.

In the catalog project, I can define reinforcement. In the catalog project I can define several reinforcement cages at once. Of course, we recommend keeping certain logic to be able to easily browse through the catalogs to find the proper cages suited for your host to be reinforced.

You see it's very simple. You only need to know Revit. And that's it. And most of the job is done. If you know how to set layout rules, constraints to formwork faces, or other sets to obtain the desired behavior of those sets, like avoid collisions or whatever, then your life just got fun working with this tool.

Additional to specifying the name of the rebar cage in the comment parameter, if you want to propagate your rebar cage in a catalog by phase, you will have to mark the phase which the user will click when later propagating in his working project. For that you need the material called SOFiSTiK search phase, which you simply apply to the desired phase.

Our out-of-the-box cages for beams, columns, foundation, we don't have this special naming material assigned to a phase, which makes the radio-button later in the tool inactive. So this is not mandatory to do. Simply, if you don't have it, the bi-phase, radio button is not active. It's not selectable.

Or the other way around, if you have a cage, as the ones from beams and columns, and you want to later on to be able also to propagate by host or by phase, you need to assign this material called SOFiSTiK search phase to one of the phases.

Knowing all of this, let's have, again, a look how the tool is working. You saw how little the user needs to point out to SOFiSTiK RC which ones are the catalogs, simply show the path. The main magic here is done already by Revit and this is through the feature constraints and propagate.

Time must be invested once to conceive those cages. And later on, your team can profit from your reinforcement solutions. This modus operandi speeds up modeling enormously and not only modeling, but also creation of working libraries because you don't need to learn another interface. You simply have to know Revit. And that's it.

This was the Rebar Template tool. This was the Rebar Template tool which uses the constraints and propagate API in Revit. Let me jump now to the other development related to reinforcement, called Rebar Modeler

Rebar Modeler, as the name suggests, is delivered with SOFiSTiK Bridge and infrastructure Modeler. You will see at the end of the presentation, why not in SOFiSTiK reinforcement? Although there are some arguments to have it in both products. Who knows, perhaps in the future? Let me know what you think about this.

Before diving into details of Rebar Modeler, let me present you the concept of SOFiSTiK Bridge and Infrastructure Modeler. I will refer to the presentation as BIM.

As BIM uses cross-section, so adaptive families which can be distributed and interpolate along a path according to some rules to create geometrical volumes as formwork for bridges and infrastructure projects, basically everything which can be defined along an axis, bridges, tunnels, roads, sidewalks, foot bridges, train bridges, et cetera. This is the entire approach summed up in a couple of words.

For a full disclosure, I come from the building world. So I don't have a sound background about bridges and infrastructure projects. Therefore, I beg your pardon in case I use some wrong terms here.

Thanks to one of our key user, Leonhardt Andrau, and partner, Bharathan [INAUDIBLE]. I am going to highlight what you can design with SOFiSTiK bridge and infrastructure modeler. In the handout, you will find some information about the project. And in the following videos, you will see the level of modeling as BIM is able to achieve.

And so we select an axis and click on this button. And you see you have different previews to understand or define the axis of the alignment. The variables used, you can also define secondary axis. And it makes it intuitive, even for one like me, which does not know much about such infrastructure project. Changing the scale per mouse scroll, I find it very cool. And I can imagine it comes very handy when checking or defining a new variation of gradient.

You see we have defined here with those red lines, also some secondary axis. And you see we have here, also, a 3D preview of those axis. Very nice. The colleagues from [INAUDIBLE] managed to get the best of SPM with this project. Look how cool the crossbeams are defined with respect to the secondary axis.

Now let's find a better view to be able to see this. Right, that's very nice. And if you select one of these BIMs and go in the cross-member editor, I think it's called, you have here also a very nice preview. And you can toggle through the section and see the cross-member varying, for example, like this.

As BIM helps also to precisely place the cables and anchorages at the proper points, the position of the anchorages were proved with SBIM in this case. So SBIM, it is used not only to model geometries distributed along an axis, but also to model pylons, foundation, and other bridge components which names I don't know.

Now let's see how we bring the most of Revit when it comes to freeform rebars with the technology of SPM. The freeform rebars are a powerful element of Revit-- another one-- and as the name suggests, you can freely model rebars without a matching rebar-shaped family. They allow us to model reinforcement for complex geometry like the generic model formworks, which are created with a SOFiSTiK bridge and infrastructure modular.

In infrastructure projects which have construction elements with geometry driven by an axis, most of the time this axis is a 3D spline. We need to use the freeform reinforcement. Lately in Revit, we noticed also some big improvements in this direction I'm talking about this new feature in 2024.

And, finally, let me showcase the Rebar Modeler. When we thought how reinforcement for these elements should look like, we noticed that it only makes sense to use the same approach. Also, for modeling, it's hosted reinforcement.

The Rebar Modeler uses the same adaptive cross-section family as [? SBIM ?] uses to generate the formwork, creates freeform reinforcement without constraint but with a relationship with the formwork not being forgotten.

Fully parametric modeling is possible. And updates by demand or automatically is also possible. We will dive into it right away.

It is useful for infrastructure projects, like we see on the left-hand side, or, also, for simpler elements, like we see on the other side of the screen, for a wall like this, for example, It can create [INAUDIBLE] And you see here, it can create a rebar system, we named it. Or it can create simply rebar sets, one at a time.

Let me simply explain what's happening in this video. We start by loading the adaptive family, which was used to model the formwork and has already sketched some rebars in it, into the project. And we see the shapes down left.

And then we point out the start and end placement for the sets and some properties, how the sets should behave inside of the rebar system. So you define for each shape, what it is, rebar in section or a section of rebar, so the longitudinal bars from the system or the transversal bars of the system.

Through this family-- so as I mentioned before, it's the same family used to model the formwork but also the rebar shapes. And through this, family is made, actually, the connection between formwork and reinforcement, and inside of the system between reinforcement itself.

In the simplified preview window, you will also be able to see the reinforcement. And at the end, you can generate it. Do you see it was at once generated and without any collisions? So all those three buses were created at once.

Further, my colleague here who made this video is highlighting that we can create, also, the end rebars, so the U bars around an edge. And he connects, now, the relationship between the bending points of the shape, setting diameter and of course, the behavior, the spacing, and the entire behavior of the set.

You see we have also the 3D view, simplified. Not all the pieces are represented there. But with this preview, you can avoid a trial-error workflow.

At the beginning of the previous video, you saw that we loaded a family, an adaptive family into the project, with some shapes already defined, already sketched. We improved also the sketching of the rebars inside of these families. And you see here some examples where you can create rebars based on non-continuous references.

The rebar dialogue, you also saw it was very helpful to set the rules for each individual set created in the system. And you can transport information from one shape to another inside of the system, very comfortable with this rebar dialogue.

Of course, parametric offsets definition, it's also possible. And the property, the rebar cover of the host, it's also transferred inside of the family to the rebar system. But, of course, we can also create exceptions from it. As you see here, this violet shape, rebar shape, it has an offset from the rebar. So you can respect the cover or create a different cover, let's say, with these exceptions.

On top of everything I said until now, which I think you also found it very cool, is that does not-- I mentioned it, actually, also before-- does not work only with axis. You can distribute reinforcement, also along host edges, or also lines. This makes the tool very useful, also, for other projects.

For example, here, this retaining wall was created like that. And it was inside of this rebar system-- simplified rebar system-- were created additional placement, which I can also point here. For example, you see how the bars are varying here on this side. And they come constant. And then their variation is on-- yeah, other way on the other side.

You will be also able to distribute reinforcement in its own bending plane. We noticed from our users that this is also desired in some cases. And you can easily define the exact segment length in a simple wall, which varies like you see in the right-hand screenshot.

The control of adaptivity of the system to host changes is also very important. For very complex reinforcement systems, this is mandatory to be achieved. In the right-hand side, as we see in this video, you see the geometry was changed and the reinforcement is automatically following the formwork. So by default, it's not working like this.

And we think this is also what the users wants. And this is the feedback we received until now. By any host changes, the reinforcement should stay in its place. And later on, you will be able to pick one of the rebar sets from the system, click an update button, and then the reinforcement system will follow, also, the host.

Yeah, you can imagine that these are just snippets of video I just want to show you to go as fast as possible through the features. The creation of reinforcement, of course, it's not working that way as we present in this video. It takes some time. But at the end of the day, you have this nice model. And similar to rebar templates, rebar system can be duplicated inside of a project or imported from other projects.

Since at the end you will have this rebar system as described earlier, the entire information about the system can be propagated. If you want to say it like this, it's not propagating, of course. And we call it, rather, duplicate rebar system inside of a project.

So you see for the first section of the tunnel, we generated the reinforcement once. Then we duplicate it with the same system to the next one. So it's not needed to go again to all these rebar shapes and set other rules, unless you want an exception in this case.

This is possible, I mentioned, inside of the project. But it's possible also to export this adaptive family and use it in other projects and import them lately in other projects.

So we reached to the end Thank you Autodesk University for offering me the opportunity to represent SOFiSTiK team. And I hope to see you again next year with user projects and other cool developments from both Autodesk and SOFiSTiK-side. Let's stay connected and see you soon. Bye