SpeedBrace is a configurator tool intended to assist structural engineers with modeling and locating diagonal Buckling Restrained Brace Frame lateral systems on a rectangular building. Modeling diagonal brace elements in Revit can be a tedious process and determining where to locate the braces can be challenging as they shouldn’t clash with architectural elements or limit daylight/views on the facade.

SpeedBrace builds off of the Structural Frame Configurator allowing users to create a model of their desired structural gravity system and BRB lateral system instantly. SpeedBrace requires users to input the structural member to model the brace on each of the four walls and the tool automatically models braces at every bay. They can also flip the orientation of the braces. If the users don’t want braces in every bay, they can go in and easily delete any unwanted braces on the Revit model. This saves the user time in modeling braces and instead they can visualize different brace placements and remove ones they don’t need. The tool also requests the number of bays of brace frames per wall they hope to have in their design once they delete unwanted brace bays to calculate the percent of wall area not blocked by the brace. The percent of wall area free per each wall and on the total structure is output so the user can determine how much of the facade/views the braces are blocking to make design changes.

Video Tutorial:

Dynamo Script Behind the Tool:

The Dynamo script first uses the Structural Configurator tool in order to obtain user inputs about the desired structure like bay sizes, height, length and width to frame the structure using desired structural members.

After creating the gravity framing, inputs regarding the braces are asked for. These include the brace member for each wall and whether the user would like to flip the orientation or not. The number of bays of brace frames they would like to have on each wall are also used for % of free wall space calculations.

After taking the inputs, the script uses the points that compose the grid on level 2 of the structure and splits them up into the points on the four walls.

After which, for each wall, I create a list for the start points and the end points. For the start points, I bring the z-coordinate back to 0 (Since I am using Level 2 points) and remove the last item in the list. For the end points, I remove the first item in the list. This results in the braces being drawn from the bottom left to the top right.

I use those start points and end points to draw the brace from bottom left to top right. I then mirror those braces about the horizontal plane and translate them up in order to flip the orientation to be top left to bottom right.

Based on which orientation the user selects, the tool models it in Revit.

Since that only models the first floor of braces it, I then copy it up to every floor using the floor heights of each floor as the z-translation.

Then, I model the braces with the structural framing type the user has selected.

I then use the structural member chosen and the number of braces they wish to have in their final design to calculate the percent of free area on the facade not blocked by the brace. This gets the height of brace and length of the brace to be used in calculations.

Lastly the percent of free area per wall and in total are calculated and output as evaluators.