FrameBuild 2022
FrameBuild 2022 is a tool designed to help users quickly and easily generate shed or shelter framing designs that will withstand environmental loads, at minimum cost. This tool utilizes an Excel sheet of material properties, and outputs an Excel sheet of member lengths and quantities as well as an estimated materials cost. FrameBuild 2022 calculates relevant live loads and optimizes the number of supporting members such that they meet the appropriate loads with the desired factor of safety, and then generates a wireframe Revit model of the framing structure.
The generated structure is calculated such that all members can be readily built from standard 2x4 boards, apart from the center roof beam (which should be a 2x6 or 2x8 board). This tool currently functions only in Imperial units (on a per-foot basis), but future modification to fit metric needs only requires changing a few coefficients in the number-of-supports calculation. An example generated geometry is shown below:
A tutorial video on usage of the tool can be found here (slightly over-time).
Guide to Dynamo Program
The below image shows the program sections that pull information from the Excel sheet. The upper group imports member density, yield strength, and price-per-foot, while the lower imports weight-per-area densities for roofing materials.
This next image shows the input parameters. Users can choose a member material, a factor of safety, and building dimensions, as well as selecting environmental conditions that the structure will need to endure.
The next section selects a roofing thickness and resulting weight-per-area density from the environmental conditions, and calculates live loads accordingly.
The program then calculates the necessary number of supports in an iterative fashion, with an initial guess based off of known information and a final answer accounting for the weight of the supports.
This large section creates Dynamo lines in the shape of the final framing and prepares pairs of points to create adaptive components in Revit geometry.
Finally, this section processes member lengths to determine an approximate cost, while exporting the necessary dimensions and number of parts needed to Excel. It also creates a wireframe model of Revit tube geometry to help visualize the shape of the final structure.
