Structural engineers, especially those who specialize in concrete buildings, often perform reinforcement detailing tasks. There are several features tools in Autodesk® Revit® that can assist with rebar creation, like creating a group of reinforcement or individual rebar, area reinforcement, and fabric sheets. It’s quite OK because you can use standard shapes or draw a unique shape of rebar, define different layout rules, and so on. But if you need to do that over and over again, it takes huge amounts of time.
So, whilst searching for tools that can help save you time, don’t overlook the visual programming tool inside Revit – Dynamo. Even with some basic knowledge and efforts, Revit users can quickly learn it and start creating their own basic scripts to automate work.
We went ahead and created a couple of Dynamo scripts using default nodes, nodes created by others, and some that we created from scratch to automate rebar placement. Scripts can contain from just a few nodes to dozens or even hundreds to automate more situations.
This is how one script for automating the layout of diagonal rebars around openings looks like. It also searches for situations in which rebar should be bent due to lack of space.
And here’s the result that a script like that can produce:
So, those are several ways you can create reinforcement in Revit: using Autodesk Revit reinforcement tools, creating Dynamo scripts on your own, or using our Dynamo scripts for automated rebar placement, which are available for free upon request for users of our Precast Concrete BIM Solution.
