Profile/shape catalog management in Live Link

Grasshopper Tekla
1

Hi

Two questions:

  1. Has GH/Tekla live link been used enough to be confident that using a tool like “Profile” to create profiles for a high-stakes project would not add risk to our team?

  2. We started with DWG profiles on a project, imported using Tekla native tool and not grasshopper. Our manager decided to create Tekla sketched profiles instead to replace the DWG profiles and used the same name for the profiles. This created duplicate profiles, one sketched (new) and one DWG (old). Tekla chose the old profiles and would not update the old elements to the new sketched profile. I know using GH would eliminate the need for the sketched profile (it actually solves the problems that drove the decision to switch to sketched profiles, hence question 1 above), but is there a way to use GH to delete the old DWG profile and keep the new sketched profile so the transition works as desired for our manager?

Thanks

Edit: I believe we solved this by deleting all duplicate profiles affected from the “Edit polygon cross section” →"Modify Cross Section" dialog, save and close/reopen model, delete affected profiles from “Profile catalog” dialog, close/reopen model, and import .uel profiles wanted with same name. Some element needed realigned but at least had correct profile. Question 1 is the more important for me because using GH is a better way to manage profiles in Tekla than either method available in Tekla native, but there is fear of the unknown if using GH tools could add risk of corrupting models, etc. I’m personally all in but my team is very risk averse, as they should be.

2

Hi Forrest,

The GH-Tekla link has been used on 100s if not 1000s of projects including a majority of the recent BIM Awards finalists, so it’s well proven in that regard. Like with any tool you’re using there are best practices that will vary depending on the project scope and requirements. I’d recommend trialing the link on a smaller project to figure out what these practices could be for your particular workflows.

The Create Profile component has been there for close to 5 years and I can’t recall hearing about issues with it yet, apart from the recent smooth arc thing that was resolved by allowing more contour points (knock on wood :slight_smile:).

With regards to that discussions, having more points in your profiles will make inserting and modifying the beams a bit slower. I performed some testing on a set of 1000 beams and got these results (in seconds):

  9 points   1.4    1.3   1.5   1.4   1.4   1.4   1.3    1.4   1.4   1.5   1.4
 99 points   1.6    1.5   1.5   1.6   1.5   1.5   1.6    1.6   1.7   1.6   1.6
299 points   2.2    2.0   2.1   2.1   2.1   2.2   2.2    2.2   2.2   2.1   2.1
999 points   6.3   18.7   6.3   6.2   6.3   6.1   9.6   14.7   6.1   6.1   6.2

For timing I’ve disabled the ‘Run in background’ option for the components. You’ll notice that when using below 100 points the point count doesn’t really matter. Using 299 points takes 50 % longer and using 999 points takes 4 times as long. Then there are those rogue values in the last row where it took even longer (presumably some kind of temporary API congestion), but this issue seems to disappear when using the default option ‘Run in background’.

Viewing/rotation speed of the model isn’t noticeably affected, after all even a 999 point straight beam will only contain a 1000 or so faces, while items might have 100 000 faces and still perform well.

Cheers,

Sebastian

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@sebastian.lindholm i always appreciate your efforts. this is exactly what i needed, once again. thank you sir

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