I've got some direction on how to deal with engineering for beams and joists, not high on the priority list right now but I've been giving it some thought:
https://forums.sketchup.com/t/intersecting-faces-or-edges/53452
At first gathering the geometric information from the model seemed the most challenging aspect of this problem but after giving it more thought, dealing with multi-span beams with various distributed and point loads is also not a trivial problem. My current beam calculator is very limited in this respect and can only handle very simple loading on a single span.
http://design.medeek.com/resources/beam/beam_calculator.pl
And yet even with the simplicity of the span and loading the logic and calculations required is fairly substantial. The output of the beam calculator will attest to this.
To properly analyze a multi-span beam with complex loading requires some magic from my engineering texts (ie. matrix analysis). Since beams and joists are one dimensional as compared with trusses (two dimensional) the math is not nearly as cumbersome but it should prove to be a bit of a challenge.
https://forums.sketchup.com/t/intersecting-faces-or-edges/53452
At first gathering the geometric information from the model seemed the most challenging aspect of this problem but after giving it more thought, dealing with multi-span beams with various distributed and point loads is also not a trivial problem. My current beam calculator is very limited in this respect and can only handle very simple loading on a single span.
http://design.medeek.com/resources/beam/beam_calculator.pl
And yet even with the simplicity of the span and loading the logic and calculations required is fairly substantial. The output of the beam calculator will attest to this.
To properly analyze a multi-span beam with complex loading requires some magic from my engineering texts (ie. matrix analysis). Since beams and joists are one dimensional as compared with trusses (two dimensional) the math is not nearly as cumbersome but it should prove to be a bit of a challenge.