Autodesk® Revit® Wood Framing Extension

I have had customers ask if Autodesk Revit Structure can stud out walls. Before this extension I would say “no,” but now I can finally say “yes.” There are other extensions that you can buy separately from Revit, but this one comes free for subscription customers.

If you are a Revit Structure user and have subscription, go to the Autodesk subscription site and download the Extensions for Revit Structure. Inside this, you will find this time-saving tool for wood stud framing.

This tool is great if you are a design build firm, because it allows you to frame out walls so you can quickly generate takeoffs, schedules, sections, elevations, 3d perspectives and other views of the stud framing. Without this tool, one would have to manually place every stud or have to create arrays to place studs at certain distances. It also makes it easy to reframe, because you can quickly delete the old framing and re-create it over and over again until it suits your needs.

I could not find any help documentation, so I will give you some pointers as to what I have discovered so far. This tool works best if you are working directly on the Architect’s model. It will not work if you have a linked Architectural file. You can only generate studs based on the walls you have from your file, not the one that has been linked in from the Architect. Worst-case scenario, you can copy the Architect’s structural walls and paste them into your own and generate the studs based off of your own wall.

For this example, I will set up the Wood Framing Walls extension to produce a typical framing detail such as this:

 
The first step would be to add a wall with an opening on it. This opening can be the opening from the Architect’s window or an opening from my default Revit Structure family library. It will work either way.

Now to generate the studs, I will select the wall and go to my “Add-Ins” tab on the Ribbon and click:

 
You must have the wall selected to frame before you will be able to use the tool. You can select multiple walls if you want.

 
Double click on wood frame walls. Much of this is self explanatory if you try changing variables. What is not so obvious is the User Defined Elements feature:

This feature works like a coordinate system. My wall has an origin which is the lower left corner of the wall. This may be on the opposite side if you are looking at the other side of the wall. See image below.


Now, to place the stud in the correct location, you have to understand that the right end of the stud is the X1 and the Y1 location and the left end is the X2 and Y2 respectively. See illustration below. Another thing that occurred to me is that when I was typing in a distance of 1’ – 10” for example, the program is very picky in the way that you write those numbers. You cannot enter “1’10” like you can in Revit. You have to enter something like 1’ – 10” (with space and dash) or else it will just give you a blank entry and not accept the value. Every time you enter anything new, you must press the “Update Data” button.

 
With all this in mind, I will go ahead and create what we set out to do here. The first thing I will take care of is the double top plate. Click on “External Framing” then the “Top plate” Tab. Here, I would like to have one top plate laid flat on top of another. I will select the choice for double plate and check the box for rotated to get them to lay flat (see below).

Now, I will select my bottom plate (sole Plate) by clicking the tab. I will rotate it by clicking on the “rotated” check box. Look at the preview and you will see it update. Now for my header on my opening, I will click the “Openings” button on the left and click the “Header” tab. You must now actually click on the particular opening that you want to edit. I will do this and my opening turns red. See illustration below. Once you have selected the specific opening to edit, you can change the Header to one that suits you. Click the Sill tab and change the type of sill that you would like. Be sure to click the rotate tab to get the stud in the correct orientation.

Opening turns red
 
Now my king studs:

The final thing I will add are the Cripple studs. Click the “Studs and Blocking” button. First, I will click the “user defined” radial button under the distribution of cripple studs and choose “1” for each of them as shown on the image below. Now I will click the OK button and Revit will generate the framing.

Another drawback is that it cannot do curved walls, so those would have to be done manually somehow.

In addition to this, it cannot handle walls with a curved profile very well. See below. So, just generate what you can and model the rest in manually.

As you can see, I can still go back and modify the studs to my liking, so nothing is permanent.

I also noticed that there is no way yet to do this kind of header:

So, what I did was use a similar one, and deleted the bottom and top studs to make is the way I needed it.

 My conclusion is that in spite of its drawbacks, this tool saves a tremendous amount of time in not having to do the bulk of the modeling. Fortunately, all of these studs are Revit families and can be swapped out for others, change sizing or moved over. I hope this is helpful in determining whether this tool can work for your firm.