This app may not help you in the traditional sense of practicing architecture, but I would be remiss if I said it was completely useless. There are a lot of things that you have no idea what they are for or how they could possibly help you, that is until you run across that one situation where it is the perfect app for the job. (I've inserted the tool analogy here before, but I'll spare you from it this time)
Autodesk Force Effect is another free app available from Autodesk. I had looked at it, played with it, but it didn't make much sense to me and I didn't really understand where it could come in handy so there it sat filed away with the other architecture apps on my ipad and never got used.
Since I am in the process of getting my Architecture license, I am in the middle of doing IDP and taking the registration exams. Most recently I sat for (and passed) the Structural Systems Exam (which if you are in the field, taking the exams, or having recently taken the exams, you know that the Structural Systems exam haunts many people).
As I was sitting one night late studying equations and free body diagrams, and force diagrams for trusses I was just not understanding how the answer given was achieved, even after following the commentary on the answer I was still not grasping it. Then it occurred to me, Force Effect was almost perfect for this!
I opened the app, and very slowly (because I wasn't familiar with how to make it work) drew the truss in question, applied the loads like in the problem and instantly watched the program calculate the reactions. I could select any member in the truss and it would show me the reactions in that member. I could click and drag a portion of the truss (like moving the top chord up or down), or move the applied load and watch the reactions change in real time.
The program will also generate a report that you can email to anyone. The report contains all the forces in the entire structural member broken down by all the sub-members and individually calculated. You could pick any given vector in the truss and see the equation of how the forces were calculated. The program also interacts with the Autodesk Cloud (so having an Autodesk 360 account is beneficial) and you can save each of the members you calculate to the cloud and access them then from any computer.
It was a great tool for my studying of structures and helped me understand more in depth how loads are transferred through a truss. I could draw different versions (Howe, Pratt, etc.) and see how their reactions differed. The most valuable part I think was changing the load on the applied truss and watching and studying how the reactions changed.
The program goes on to allow you to take (or import) photographs, then draw on top of the photograph with your forces and vectors. In that sense I could see how it could be beneficial in a real world setting, but more as a teaching tool. In the field (or before hand) you could take a photograph of a truss in an installed position, then in real time draw on top of the photograph adding all the members and forces and demonstrate how the truss reacts directly to the forces applied. Hook up your ipad to apple TV or a projector and you increase its power even more.
If anyone out there reading these posts are taking your ARE's, or know of people taking there ARE's, I would absolutely suggest this app as a study tool. I believe it also is available on android and iphone, so there is some cross platform compatibility.
