Hi I believe it’s time VA to deal with structural walls. I know that load bearing checkbox exists, but it’s byobject and it cannot be applied to a certain layer of a wall, but in a wall as a whole.
Example: pink is insulation, blue reinforced concrete, purple masonry and the interior red is plaster.
If we wanted to have the blue as separate wall, to apply load bearing, then we should have at the same place the exterior wall with insulation and interior plaster but with the core of masonry hidden (second wall style) but even in this case we all know that all the walls are interacting together, producing wrong joints and many problems in the produced geometry.
BIM is all about following standards. The workaround of course is to use columns, but structrural walls are not columns in both real life or/and in the ifc standard documentation. So it’s a workaround to overcome geometry problems but it’s totally wrong in terms of standards.
Revit has separated the structural from the normal ones. This should also apply on slabs.
I would like to kindly ask VA team, to prioritize such a basic feature. I am aiming into collaboration between architects, structural and MEP engineers via Visualarq/Karamba3D/ladybug workflows, so in my opinion, it’s a very important sector, following ifc standards correctly.
@GabrielB What’s wrong in having the blue wall (with the insulation and the plaster layer) with the Load bearing enabled to define it as a structural wall? why do you need to break it down into two overlapping walls? (if I’ve understood you properly), which will give you intersection problems.
How does affect the fact the load bearing is assigned by wall object and not by wall layer (which you can currently handle with the Type (Core/Normal)) to collaborate with Structural and MEP engineers with Karamba or Laydbug tools? .
We agree that, geometric behavior and structural data, are two different things.
Yes, we have the Core/Normal option for layers, but that only helps with geometry cleanups and joins. It doesn’t solve the IFC and data separation problem.In a real workflow, we might have a non-structural wall that still uses a ‘Core’ layer just to connect properly with other walls. If we rely on the object-level ‘Load bearing’ checkbox, then the whole wall and its layers, inherit the load bearing boolean value. By the way, as we had discussed before, having ‘Load bearing’ strictly by object and not by style makes it unsustainable for large-scale projects.
I think that Revit handles this like this: Structural Walls are fundamentally treated as a separate category, just like Structural Columns and Beams. This allows everyone (Architects, Structural, and MEP engineers) to instantly isolate and audit the load-bearing model of the building. If we flag a whole composite wall as load-bearing just because one of its layers is concrete, the IFC export includes the insulation and plaster data in the structural model. This creates analytical eccentricity (shifts the center line) and ruins the calculation in tools like Karamba3D.
Unless I’m missing a specific VisualARQ workaround for this, wouldn’t a style-based approach or a dedicated structural wall component better fit the OpenBIM standards? The exact same logic should apply to slabs as well; we need a clear distinction between structural slabs (concrete) and architectural floors (finishes/insulation) to avoid Z-axis eccentricity in analytical models.
Separating structural elements from architectural ones is a core principle in OpenBIM, and it would drastically improve the VisualARQ workflow for collaborative projects.
On top of that, this approach would ensure seamless compatibility with Revit and Rhino.Inside.Revit (RiR) out of the box (even though I’m not using revit).
Ideally, these standard BIM architectural-to-structural workflows should be handled natively by VisualARQ, so users don’t have to look for custom workarounds.
I agree that we need to implement the Load Bearing property by Style (in walls, slabs, columns and beams). It’s planned for future versions.
But this still will affect the whole wall (including the layers that are not core). Structural walls in Revit may have also other layers than the Structural one.
I’d like to understand why you need to define the load bearing property by Wall Layer. For IFC, this would be useless right now, because only the parameters assigned to the whole object (and not to the components) are saved in the IFC file.
If you need to obtain the geometry of a Core Layer in Load Bearing walls, for further analysis in Karamba, LadyBug or other workflows, you can already do it in Grasshopper. You first filter those walls that are “load Bearing”, and from those, you can deconstruct the style to obtain the layers that are core. See the following GH file.
