Many of you may already know that if you would like to design a pile cap for punching shear with Robot you need to manually model the pile cap as a panel and then manually set up all the piles and the footprint of the column. This can be a real pain when the geometry changes!
A better approach is to unleash the power of Dynamo to help model the analytical panels and nodes that can be used by Robot Structural Analysis. You will first need to make sure that the package ‘Structural Analysis for Dynamo’ has been installed.
You will then see a range of nodes that allow you to take Revit geometry into Dynamo and then create Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis elements. The main idea behind the process is to take the top surfaces of the pile caps and then build panels from these in Robot. We then take the footprint of the column and the pile diameters and model these as panel openings. In the example I have used you can see the Revit model and the panels and nodes that are created in…