Bridgemodeling

Hello,

This is part 1

This blog is about the integration of Revit and Civil using the bridgemodeler.

First time the bridgemodeler came out in was in the middle of 2009 (revit 2010). It only allowed for single bended bridges. This wasn't all that usefull since I could do that already in Revit. After finding that out I simply ignored it... sorry Autodesk.

At the end of 2009 a new one came out that allowed for more bending. At that time I just installed win 7 64 bit on my laptop. For some reason I didn't get it to work. When I took an winxp 32 bit machine it worked.

First exploring started. until march 15 2010..... was this timebomb really nessecary? At that time I was supporting a client doing a project in Revit and Civil. (ofcourse somewhere it was probably written that there was a time limit)

So when 2011 came out I started again. My first experience was that the bridgemodeler extension behaved like nitroglycerine. Don't touch it or it goes boem immediately. It turns out there was a dll naming error for the 64 bit installations. I got some very nice help from Autodesk. (thanks again)

So I started prepping for a big presentation. I took the dataset from Shrewsberry and created a bridge and a tunnel that no one needed or asked for. Here a navisworks image just to get you oriented a bit.

Van Bridgemodeler

What you should probably know of me first is that I am a Revit consultant and have a background in Architecture and building and construction. I always stayed away from civil because it reminds me a lot of Autocad Architecture. I am not really a fan of Autocad Architecture. But because of market development it was required of me to have an understanding of civil 3D ( I got trained by an expert but I don’t do consultancy for civil 3D)

So I started designing a horizontal alignment and a vertical profile, next I create a basic assembly and build a corridor with 3 regions. I generally do that so region two becomes the bridge part. I am not saying that it is the right way but it sort of does the trick for me right now.Next I run the bridge extension (the most simple one) play around with parameters and go.

I started up Revit and use the integration with Civil 3D extension. I must say I very much like this extension it let me pick exactly what I want from civil and what not. It is probably better though not to bring the terrain.

When you run the bridgemodeler extension you get a very simple bridge. I selected one of the piers and noticed that I can bring this pier to the family editor. So the next thing I tried, let’s see what I can modify before I break it.

To be on the save side I saved that family under a different name and I the reimported into the project. You can substitute existing piers for your new family. If you rerun the extension in either civil or revit it will ignore your piers and replace them for it’s own. It’s easy to substitute those piers again but you will lose the height information. I ended up simply copy pasting this information from one pier to another. This is okay for 5 piers.
Later I found out if you really look at the extension screens by the piers you can select which pier family you want... I should have noticed this earlier.

Van Bridgemodeler

I ended up switching the data a couple of times back and forth between Civil and Revit and I was quiet pleased with the functionality.

When you import a civil bridge into Revit you get masses. Which is great I thought because I can edit those… So I opened the mass into the family editor. But to my disappointment you can’t edit anything whatever I select everything remains greyout. I can’t even move things.

So I thought let’s create a new inplace mass and see if I can sweep something past an edge of this mass. Yes it will let me select the edge but it will project it self onto a workplane. 

Van Bridgemodeler

That doesn’t help me.

I also explored the idea of creating a roof onto that mass and tell a wall to attach to that roof. No luck there either. (Normally you can but not this shape of wall)

What did work was attaching a curtainsystem to the barrier mass and setup the curtain system to behave/look like a railing. This gave me a very nice result for the railing.

Van Bridgemodeler

In civil I also created another bridge that is going to act like a tunnel. As you can tell my modeling techniques can be described as schizophrenic. As I am now only interested in modeling I’ll ignore the discussion about abusing tools.

For the tunnel I needed some walls on the side. I had some trouble with targeting which has nothing to do with civil but mainly with me. I took the civil tunnel to revit. I re-ran the bridgemodeler extension and I created big barriers (I oversized them). These barriers have the same height all along the alignment. I don’t want that. I tried several tricks getting some walls that would follow the alignment at the bottom and would stop at a level with their top.

I described before that you can’t do a whole lot with the masses the bridgemodeler makes, but you can subtract something from it. This enabled me to build a barrier with a varying height.

Van Bridgemodeler

The two other voids were build by the bridge modeler extension

Van Bridgemodeler

I applied a curtain system to this barrier mass because the lines it generates explains more of the shape. Notice the horizontal lines by the right barrier and the form following lines on the left one.

Van Bridgemodeler

So far my exploration of possibilities with the bridgemodeler. Please share your own experiences. There were many more findings but it's getting rather lengthy already.

Please share your own experience

This was part 1