Creating 3D Beam Systems on Ruled Surfaces

Even though this feature is quite easy to use, not so many of our architects know that it’s possible to make a 3D beam systems placed on top of a ruled surface. They often tend to believe that it’s only possible on flat work planes. But the screenshot below show us that it can be adapted to many situations.

So how does it work? Let’s take the first simple situation and imagine we have 2 simple walls but with non-horizontal heads like shown below:

After having clicked on the Beam System tool in the Structure Tab, select the Pick Supports tool as shown below and click on the 2 walls. You’ll see a small Slope icon displayed on each line.

Don't forget to close the sketch by adding the 2 opposite lateral lines and change the Beam Direction by clicking on the right icon.

Terminate the process by clicking on the green Finish button. Here’s the result that you should get.

Now this is a basic case. Let's imagine a more complex case with bent walls including ruled surfaces and mapped on top of a mass.

Here, Revit will not be able to select the walls as Supports. We will have to trick it out and use some beams to fake wall heads. These beams will be created using the Beam tool and Pick line option.

Once your beams are created, select the Create Beam System tool back again and do the same as in the previous example selecting 2 sets of opposite beams to create the first row of beams. Always be sure to have the 3D option activated in the Instance properties palette.

Repeat the same action for the opposite row of beams.

You may notice that beams are straight and not following the ruled surface. If you’d like to perfectly follow each curvature of your ruled surface, we can use a workaround by splitting our global shape with a network of 5mm void boxes as shown below. This will allow us to position our beams one by one on each fake grid/edge.

And then we'll get this awesome result!