Wall by Face via Generic Model Family

I learned something new yesterday from Brian Mackey in his monthly webinar "Revit Radio" with guys from CAD-1 so I thought I'd share it here. When dealing with non-vertical wall, you either have to model wall as in-place family or using massing and create Wall-by-Face. Either way is a valid method. What's new to me is that you can also use Wall-by-Face and pick a surface of a Generic Model family in a project and create a wall. This includes Adaptive Component created as generic model. This is such a good news to me. Why? Compare with Massing family, adaptive component has adaptive points where it can be very flexible to host on anything in the project. One will be able to create a surface with AC and use Wall-by-Face to generate this kind of free form wall.

Start with a simple 4 point adaptive component.

I am using this family to replicate the curve wall from Philip Johnson's St. Basil's chapel in Houston, Texas.

To do so, I will need one edge to be curve and set a shape handle point along the curve in order to adjust the location.

When finished, place the family like this in the project.

With the adaptive point (4) and shape handle point, I can adjust the edge very easy with no need to use formula or special parameter.

Next, use Wall-by-Face command under wall.

and pick face...

and DONE!

AC Quirkiness Part 4 - Create Similar Command

There is a comment made recently about my previous post on another odd behavior about adaptive component. I thought I would share it on this post.

"Create Similar" is one of my favorite commands in Revit. It is also one command that I use almost every day. I could create a lot of things quickly by selecting an existing elements around the space and keep building it.

Create similar is accessible both in project environment as well as family environment. In a project, you could literally select anything 2D or 3D, then go to your option under "Modify" tab and click the icon "Create Similar"

Or you can access it via "right click" and choose from the pop-up.

How about in Family? You can pretty much do the same; however, it only applies to traditional family.

Select the geometry, go to the option, click "create similar".

Or just "right click" after you have selected the geometry. 

**The only thing I found in family that does not allow you to use "create similar" are model line and symbolic line. For some reasons, they just don't work with create similar.**

When it comes to adaptive component (or conceptual mass), once again, Revit just disable this nice feature from this type of family. If you "right click" by selecting the geometry, you actually get the same option from the pop-up window but it is grayed out. I suppose there is no time saving using "create similar" in adaptive component!?

AC Quirkiness Part 3 - Adaptive Component Visibility Setting

For those of you who have experience creating families, one can always overwrite the visibility of any geometry in the family (to set it to any detail level from Coarse, Medium or Fine; and whether to have the geometry to display in different view like Plan/RCP, Front/Back and Left/Right)

When it comes to Adaptive Component, such settings remained the same in the AC family. However, this dialog box shows it in a subtle way and you just have to know how to get to it. 

In the Adaptive Component (AC) environment, when you select the solid form, the only option that shows up are displayed in the image below. You just don't see anything that says "Visibility Settings"

If you check the Properties of the solid, it doesn't give you much of an option either. 

Look closer:

Clicking the Visibility/Graphic Overrides (VG), and this will take you directly to the Visibility Settings. 

**This is actually the same way on how traditional family works.**

You can also do the same by selecting the geometry, "right click" and choose "Visibility".

Tim Waldock from RevitCat has briefly mentioned this inconsistent setting about adaptive component.

Well, nested family, on the other hand, works differently in AC environment. You actually get this nice option just like the traditional family by selecting the nested family. The icon will present itself.

I would hope Autodesk can resolve this inconsistent setting in the family environment in the future release. As I suspect Adaptive Component is gaining more use in the project now, I can imagine more people are going to run into this issue with this behavior.

Mind Those Reference Planes!

It has been a few months since my last post about some quirkiness on adaptive components. I have this project using adaptive component to populate the building facade which posed some challenge not only with divide path direction; I stumped upon another unusual behavior with adaptive component and thought to write about this as part 2 on my blog.

For this building facade, we are using adaptive component to set up the window wall system module for number of reasons. One particular reason is that this facade has a sloping wall plane. As you might know, traditional curtain wall system doesn't work on non-vertical wall surface at all. One can try to use curtain system but it just doesn't work. Therefore, adaptive component with conceptual massing seems to be the answer for this question.

From the above image, each unit is composed by an adaptive component, there are a few different types of configuration in the facade. As we have modeled the whole facade, I notice something strange happening. Whenever I am trying to use dimension or align tool, these random "axis" started to show up. There are just so many of these axis no matter how many times you hit "tab" key to try to cycle through to something orthogonal to snap to.

I had no clue at first and thought Revit was going crazy on me. Then, I started examining the adaptive panel family and the answer was there.

Adaptive component (AC), just like any traditional family has two default reference planes, called Center (Front/Back) and Center (Left/Right). And by default, they are considered as "Strong reference" once the family is loaded to a project. However, reference planes in AC family do not serve any real purpose since "adaptive points" are taking their place on driving the geometry behavior. Unfortunately, those little reference planes are still pretty "snappy" in the project; and obviously, those reference planes become selectable more often than you expect and they appear at different angles depend on how they interact with the adaptive points as well as the massing.

Well, all you need to do is open the family (in my case, I have a handful of different type of families), select the Center (Front/Back) reference plane, and set it to "Not a Reference". Select the other one "Center (Left/Right)" ref plane and do the same, then you are good to go. Load it back to project and they are not snappy anymore! 

Divide Path Direction

I have questioned myself the logic when it comes to divide path in conceptual massing environment in the past. Recently I am working on an adaptive component for a panel where it requires a louver as part of the panel. I start with a 2 point adaptive family as a louver blade and nest it to the next family. The next family makes out of a set of reference lines and a frame, I have two edges that I use "Divide" to set up my "array".

I then place the blade family and try to use "Repeat" and lay out a series of blade.

 

It turns out the blade is going wild! At first I thought I have snapped my AC to the wrong node so it behaved unexpectedly.

After some trial and errors, I learn there is something I didn't realize before. For some reasons, when choosing an edge to divide path, one side of the edge has the node sequence backward; thus it results to an unpredictable array.

There is a hidden setting under the path properties. Select the path, check the "Show Node Numbers" and I am able to see the numbers on the path. Obviously they are going different direction.

The fix is quite easy. Check the box "Flip Direction" under the properties, it will set the path to the correct direction.

Try it again with Repeat and this time it works like a charm.

Making of Greeting Card

First post in 2014 I wanted to share with you on the "season greeting" image that I did back in the Christmas holiday. This was the third year that I made my own greeting card using Revit. In the other two years of the greeting images, I always had the same character "Parametric Snowman" as the main scheme but I would try to play with different background each year.

Snow and snow flake made from curtain wall system

So, this year following the "same" tradition, I chose snowman as a main character again but coming up with something new as a new "backdrop".

 

Staging of the Revit "model"

Snowman in the foreground used scalable trick by Kelvin Tam by nesting two levels of the "planting" family. 3D model text was created as face based generic model family. See more from this post.

When it comes to the Christmas light in the background, I got this initial idea from this precedent image.

I thought adaptive component is the way to do it. Immediately I start thinking of how I would go about making this Christmas light family.

I started by importing an image of the light bulb and used it as reference to make it as a nested light fixture family. I even assigned light source so it could glow.

 

Next, I nested this into an adaptive component. I stumbled on this for a number of times before I got it the way that would have the bulbs spread on both sides of the cable. After some trials and errors, I ended up creating 3 adaptive points and host the nested family on the opposite sides of point 1 and 2. The third adaptive point was needed since I need the first one to repeat itself once I nested this into another adaptive family.

Another challenge I had to overcome in this study was getting the orientation of the nested light bulb to point to my desired orientation. Andy from Shades of Grey made a series of diagram in this post that was helpful to get better sense of how adaptive point behaves. Still, I had to struggle many times to get it right. 

Once this was done, loaded it to another family, I created a 3 point spline and made all 3 points as adaptive points, divided the spline. Place the family on the first 3 points of the spline.

 

After the family is in place, select it and click "repeat"!

Finish up the cable as a sweep and assign material to it then it was good to go! I learned that if I set the nested light bulb as "Shared" before loading into the adaptive component, I can actually render them glowing with the photometric light source in the project.