RISAFloor & RISA-3D Connection Design Interaction

RISAFloor and RISA-3D both have the ability to have their connections designed with RISAConnection. Thus, there are three possible scenarios for connections between RISAFloor, RISA-3D and RISAConnection:

Scenario 1: Connections that are only in RISAFloor (Gravity connections in a combined RISAFloor/RISA-3D model).
Scenario 2: Connections that are in both RISAFloor and RISA-3D (Lateral connections in a combined RISAFloor/RISA-3D model).
Scenario 3: Connections that are only in RISA-3D. This scenario does not involve RISAFloor, so it is not discussed here.

Scenario 1: RISAFloor Gravity Member Connections

Connections that are gravity in RISAFloor (option 1) are only RISAFloor members, which makes this more straightforward. When designing connections from RISAFloor you get a very similar behavior to what is shown in the behavior above.

The difference is when you use the Director to go into RISA-3D and then into RISAConnection, the Gravity connections are still in the RISAConnection project. The .rcn file contains BOTH RISAFloor AND RISA-3D connections. Therefore, when entering RISAConnection from RISA-3D, you will see more connections in RISAConnection then just those sent over from RISA-3D.

Scenario 2: RISAFloor Lateral Member Connections

Additional items to consider are Load Combinations and Naming Convention, as explained in the following sections.

Load Combinations

Lateral connections in RISAFloor are also brought into RISA-3D. Thus, two sets of load combinations are brought into RISAConnection. Below is the Load Combination drop-down list from RISAConnection after coming in from a RISAFloor/RISA-3D model.

Here we can see that the RISA-3D LC's come in first, followed by those from RISAFloor.

Note: This also occurs in scenario 1, except that all of the RISA-3D load combinations will have zero loading.

When reporting results in the Connection Results spreadsheets, both programs may list load combinations from the other program if those LC's happened to be governing. In RISAFloor, it would look similar to the following image:

Click on image to enlarge it

Naming Convention

RISAFloor and RISA-3D have different naming conventions for members. Thus, members taken from RISAFloor to RISA-3D do NOT have the same name between both programs.

RISAConnection ALWAYS uses the RISAFloor naming convention. This may be a little confusing. For easier comprehension, the Connection Results spreadsheet in RISA-3D displays BOTH the RISAFloor and RISA-3D labels.

Click on image to enlarge it

In this image the F1_M and F1_C labels are the RISA-3D labels. The labels in parentheses are the RISAFloor labels.