Off the beaten path a bit today, had a discussion about engineering and the plugins, so it got me thinking about the engineering module and beams and headers. Some ideas on representing loads on beams below:
Not sure I like how the distributed loads are represented with a transparent PNG, it might be better to simply draw two connected arrows which represent the extent of the distributed load (start and end points along the length of the beam).
The colors represent different load types (ie. Dead, Live, Snow).
The magnitude will be represented by the height of the arrows and size of the arrow heads.
The loading diagrams will be placed on their own specific layer so they can easily be toggled on an off.
Initially I think it would be best to stick with just rectangular distributed loads, trapezoidal and triangular loads complicate things considerably. Notice how the loading is placed on the beam such that coincident loads are offset in the Y axis so they can be better visualized and not Z-fight each other.
This would be a significant upgrade to the plugins, allow the user to quickly calculate and check a beam or header, similar to doing a check in Weyerhauser's Forte or any other comparable engineering application.
The output would be something similar to my Beam Calculator here:
https://design.medeek.com/resources/beam/beam_calculator.pl
However the output probably should be less verbose and more compact, similar to the one page output of Forte.
Not sure I like how the distributed loads are represented with a transparent PNG, it might be better to simply draw two connected arrows which represent the extent of the distributed load (start and end points along the length of the beam).
The colors represent different load types (ie. Dead, Live, Snow).
The magnitude will be represented by the height of the arrows and size of the arrow heads.
The loading diagrams will be placed on their own specific layer so they can easily be toggled on an off.
Initially I think it would be best to stick with just rectangular distributed loads, trapezoidal and triangular loads complicate things considerably. Notice how the loading is placed on the beam such that coincident loads are offset in the Y axis so they can be better visualized and not Z-fight each other.
This would be a significant upgrade to the plugins, allow the user to quickly calculate and check a beam or header, similar to doing a check in Weyerhauser's Forte or any other comparable engineering application.
The output would be something similar to my Beam Calculator here:
https://design.medeek.com/resources/beam/beam_calculator.pl
However the output probably should be less verbose and more compact, similar to the one page output of Forte.