Friday, August 16, 2013

Curtain Wall and Engraving - Part 2

Continue on the study from my earlier post, I wanted to see the possibility of using this trick on other curtain wall panels. My good friend Kelvin Tam from Revit Swat also used this trick to create a goodbye wall from his farewell post to his firm.
At my office, we use many different architectural corrugated panels as design elements in our design. Modeling in Revit seems to be a bit of challenge. Since the panel can be as thick as 4" sometimes 6" at one point, using basic wall to represent the idea sometimes just doesn't cut it. Therefore, I came up with the idea using curtain wall to model as corrugated panel, which looks something like this:

Corrugated panel modeled as curtain wall


So, the idea of using a solid cutting out the curtain panel has become another layer of challenge. Inspired by Kelvin's post, I wanted to try for myself to use other languages in the model text and use them for cutting. From his tips, using Google Translate is probably the easiest way to get all the text I need to test it. In my case, I use the word "Welcome" from different languages.


 
All I need to do is copy and paste from Google translate to the instance parameter from my family...
 


 
Google translate offers over 70 different languages, I was very impressed by how easy it is to convert one language to another; Revit seems to take it pretty well and display it as model text.
However, once I used the model text on the corrugated panel, I started to see some unstable behavior. Since the corrugated panel is made up with nothing but curtain mullion, in order to let the solid to cut out the "panel", I had to make multiple cuts on the panel. In some case, I was able to make a clean cut to the entire panel, like this:
 


 
Other times, it is not as I expected, I get warnings like this for a few times on some words/characters:
 


 
It left me with some unlikeable result:
 


 
This also happened to the word "welcome" in Russian:
 
 
 
 

 
In conclusion, I think using a combination of this trick with Google translate worked out pretty well to my satisfaction. At the end, I was able to get different languages on a plain curtain panel.
 
  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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6 comments:

  1. UnknownAugust 27, 2013 at 10:54 AM

    Hello Mr.Chan. Great post regarding multilingual text in Revit. I'm most interested in how you achieved placing Hebrew text correctly. In case you didn't know Hebrew is written from left to right. At first the Hebrew text placed itself backwards so I mirrored it via side view. The direction was correct but each letter was backwards. I followed your instructions and used Google Translate. Could you help me to solve this problem.

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  2. AnonymousAugust 28, 2013 at 7:46 PM

    GREAT JOB PLACING MULTILINGUAL TEXT IN REVIT. i'M TRYING TO USE HEBREW TEXT INSIDE MY REVIT MODEL USING GOOGLE TRANSLATE.WHEN IT COMES IN IT PLACES THE TEXT BACKWARDS, SO I MIRRORED IT FROM A SIDE VIEW AND IT PLACED THE TEXT IN THE CORRECT ORDER FROM RIGHT TO LEFT BUT EACH LETTER WAS BACKWARDS. CAN YOU HELP ME SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

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  3. phil-osophyinBIMAugust 28, 2013 at 9:13 PM

    Hi Faigie,

    I have only tried to copy text from google translate written from left to right. My guess is it might have something to do with how Revit justify the text direction. Using google was a way to copy/paste text easily. My question for you is if the text box tool in Revit functions normally in Hebrew? If it does, the model text should work the same.

    Philip

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  4. AnonymousAugust 30, 2013 at 7:38 AM

    My edit text box does function normally and displays the text I copied from Google Translate in the right way, in the case of Hebrew text, from right to left. When I place this copied text into the model it places the text including each letter backwards.

    You say that you only tried to copy text from Google Translate written from left to right. So how did you place your Hebrew text on your last image of this post? You got the direction correct and each letter is directed properly as well. Could you please help me or perhaps try and post a detailed description of how you did this. In return I would be willing to answer any question you might have in the future assuming I could answer you.

    Thank You.

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  5. phil-osophyinBIMSeptember 1, 2013 at 11:30 PM

    Hi Eyal,

    I used the same face based family that I created with Google Translate. I didn't do anything different at all. It makes me wonder if it has something to do with the family you created. If you can upload the family file and send me a link to download, I could take a look and see if this causes all the text to justify at the wrong direction.

    Thanks

    Philip

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  6. AnonymousSeptember 2, 2013 at 8:46 AM

    OK I see what I did wrong. I'm still new to Revit. I copied the text from Google Translate and pasted into the model text command directly. I never created a Family. What family template did you choose. Could you please be descriptive about how you placed the text, did you model each letter in 3D?

    Thanks for your time and patience, I appreciate it.

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