Aside from the topic of Plate Connectivity, the concept of plate meshing is important. The concept behind finite element analysis is that you represent a structure using a finite number of elements (plates).

RISA-3D has the ability to create a finite element plate mesh for you automatically. This is a great tool for modeling elevated slab and diaphragm elements.

While RISA-3D does not have an explicit tool to punch a hole in a plate, you can use the following steps to manually model them

It’s easy to apply tapered surface loads to plates in RISA-3D by stepping up the loads from one level to the next.

When you have a plate model for a slab or wall in RISA-3D, the Internal Force Summation Tool (IFST) is a very useful analysis tool to get exactly the forces that you want to design for.