Lintels

Overview

Lintels places beams over doors and windows, and keeps each beam tied to the opening it spans.

You pick which door and window types to treat, choose a beam for each, and set how far it should bear onto the wall on the left and on the right. Then you choose how much of the model to work through: everything, a set of levels, or a set of rooms. Every matching opening gets a beam sized from its width plus the two bearings. Doors and windows are the only openings it offers.

Before each beam goes in, it checks the geometry, and this is where most of the value sits. The beam, bearings included, has to stay inside the run of its host wall - that wall plus any straight continuation of it. It must not overlap a column, structural or architectural. And it must not run into another wall at a corner or a T junction. An opening that fails one of these is left alone, and you get a list naming the opening and the rule that rejected it, instead of a run that quietly produces bad geometry. Touching a wall face or a wall end is allowed; only real overlap counts, at a millimetre tolerance.

Every beam it places records the opening it belongs to, and that record does three things. Move a level, or move a hosted door or window, and the beam follows rather than being left behind. Run the tool again with replacement on and it recognises its own earlier work, removes it and carries the old mark forward instead of stacking a second beam on the first. And it can build or refresh a schedule of the lintels it placed, adding the fields that schedule needs. The schedule sits with structural framing, so other framing shows up in it too unless you filter it.

Beam families come with the plugin and load into the document the first time you open the tool, so a fresh project needs nothing prepared in advance. Any that fail to load are reported, and loading replaces a family of the same name already in the project.

A note on what it will not do. Openings in curved walls are not checked - the beam is placed as-is. Nor are openings with no wall to host them, no placement point, or no level the tool can resolve. And if an opening's geometry cannot be read at all, it is treated as valid and gets a beam rather than showing up in the skipped list.

A run happens in four stages - schedule fields, clearing the lintels being replaced, placing the new ones, building the schedule - and each is kept once it finishes rather than the four being undone as one. A single opening that fails is recorded and the run carries on with the next; a failure while building the schedule leaves the placed lintels in the model.

Everything runs on your own machine with no network connection. It does not read or write linked models, and there is no AI in it - the checks are a fixed set of geometric rules. The interface is English or Russian, following a language setting shared across the machine.