New Planarize feature to fix poor model geometry

Tekla Structural Designer
2022
Tekla Structural Designer

New Planarize feature to fix poor model geometry

Tekla Structural Designer 2022 includes a Planarize feature for fixing certain geometry issues. This was first introduced in release 2021 SP4.

We occasionally see models with entities that are very close to, but not quite, co-planar. Such small inconsistencies can cause issues with many operations, such as load decomposition and analysis, and should be avoided. Such issues rarely result from modeling directly in Tekla Structural Designer, but may more commonly occur for import of models with geometry issues from other applications such as Revit.

An example is shown in this video, and also in the picture below, where one column of a frame is very slightly not coplanar with other columns, due to it actually being placed on a very close adjacent grid or construction line (grid line “A2” in this case).

Such poor geometry can result in beams and edges of slabs attached to the off-plane column being slightly skewed on plan, or poor analytical connectivity of these if they are modeled to the adjacent grid line A used by other beams and columns. The new “Planarize” command (first introduced in release 2021 SP4) can help correct such issues.

  • To start the Planarize operation, right-click on the target grid line (the one on which entities are correctly modeled) in any view and select “Planarize FRM…” from the context menu - e.g. on grid line “A” on which the majority of objects in this end frame are placed for the example model, as shown below.

    • Note that you can also run the Planarize command for a Frame by 1) expanding the Frames branch In the Project Workspace Structure tree then 2) right clicking on the required frame and selecting “Planarize FRM <frame ref>” from the context menu.
  • When the Planarize command is active, the Properties Window will display the settings for it and the scene view will change to highlight only entities that are in the plane and entities that are detected as being close to it, as shown in the picture below. Different colors are used to identify entities defined in, attached to, and near to the target plane, while other entities are not visible.

    • More information for each highlighted entity, including the specific distance of its nodes from the target plane, can be seen in the tooltip for a selected entity (only highlighted entities out of plane within the tolerance can be selected).


  • In the operation properties you set the Tolerance distance (default 25mm/ 1 in) for the detection of entities that are very close to the target plane. We can set for example 50mm in the example case in which the off-plane column and attached entities are 40mm from the plane. The legend gives the description and number of entities for each color category as shown in the picture above.

    • Entities in the plane are colored grey and displayed by default - their display being controlled by the “Defined in Plane” check box which is enabled by default.

    • Other colors identify objects very close to the plane. There can be a number of colors and associated legend boxes where there are entities with different distances from the target plane within the set tolerance. The colors then range from light orange to red as the distance from the target plane increases.

    • You can also enable the option “Attached to Plane” (default Off) to also display entities attached to the target plane.

  • To correct the issue, simply select objects to be moved to the target plane. Any of the usual graphical selection methods can be used to select single or multiple entities - for example in this case we can simply window around all the highlighted objects and they are all automatically moved to the target plane.

    • After the operation we can see for the example model that all the entities have been adjusted to reference the target plane grid line (A) and grid line A2 is no longer referenced by any entities.
  • Further details of the new Planarize feature are available in this help topic.
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