User Guide

Tutorial 1 - Modeling
Version 5.0 33
Wood Properties
For our model we will modify the wood material for the truss members. The
complete NDS species database is built into the program. Therefore, you can
select any valid species / grade combination and RISA-3D will provide the design
values. We are going to change the grade from “No.1” to “Select Structural”.
Select the Wood tab and type the following, using the tab button on the keyboard
to advance between fields:
DFL Select, [TAB], [TAB]
The active (green) cell should now be in the Grade field. Notice that there is also
an arrow in the cell that looks like this
.
Click the arrow to open the wood grade menu and then pick “Select Structural”
as shown in the following figure:
You could use the Save as Defaults button to make our changes the default
values for new models. Now that we’ve defined our material properties, we’ll use
them to define our members and section sets.
Design Rules – Size / UC
RISA-3D has the ability to optimize hot rolled, cold formed, wood and concrete
members. This means RISA-3D will suggest a lighter, more efficient shape for
each of our members. When suggesting an alternate shape, the program will only
consider shapes that are included in the given Design List. For example, our
Beam-Z section set defined with the “Wide Flange” redesign list. This list only
contains wide flange sections from the AISC Manual of steel construction. This
means that the program will never suggest that a channel or H pile would be a
more efficient shape. For information about editing the existing Desgin Lists or
creating your own custom design lists, refer to the General Reference manual.
Next we will specify some additional restrictions on the what types of sections the
program will choose for redesign. We do this on the Design Rules spreadsheet.
On the Data Entry toolbar press . The spreadsheet will open as
shown below: