User Guide

Before You Begin
Version 5.0 1
Before You Begin
How to Use the Manuals
This Guide is designed to be read in two ways. If you are already familiar with
structural modeling in general you can skip the supporting text and read only the
underlined action items to move through the tutorials very quickly. To do this
read the rest of this Before You Begin section and then skip to page 6 and look
for the underlined action items. If you want more thorough explanations of the
modeling process you may read all or some of the supporting text as you see fit.
The tutorials are intended for the first time user of RISA-3D or those who need a
refresher on how the program works. To complete this guide in its entirety will
take less than an hour if you perform only the underlined action items mentioned
above or 3 to 4 hours if you read all of the supporting text. We’ve broken the
tutorials up so you don’t have to do it all at once.
The tutorial is intended to teach you the basics of defining and solving models in
RISA-3D, and also how to review the results. We won’t go into a lot of depth
regarding the analytical aspects of RISA-3D here; that’s what the RISA-3D
General Reference manual and on-line help file are for. What we will cover is
how and when to apply RISA-3D features to help you be most productive. For
example, we’ll perform steel, concrete and wood code checks in this tutorial, but
we won’t discuss the specifics of how those code checks are calculated; that is
covered in excruciating detail in the General Reference sections Steel Code
Checking and Design, Concrete Code Checking and Design, and Wood Code
Checking and Design and also in the help file.
After you have gone through the User Guide,
use the General Reference and On-
line Help for detailed information on any topic. The topics are summarized in the
table of contents and are thoroughly indexed.